The single most useful fact in a month of lockage records is this: recreational traffic during daylight is nearly constant. Summed over 30 days, arrivals between 7 am and 9 pm vary only between 39 and 61 lockages per hour-slot — a coefficient of variation of just 14%, a busiest-to-quietest ratio of 1.56. Across the week it's flatter still: 25.5 chamber-loads a day on weekdays, 25.0 on weekends. In summer, there is no lunchtime crowd, no weekend surge, no quiet Tuesday. The recreational fleet is a steady background hum whenever the sun is up.
Commercial traffic in the same window has a busiest-to-quietest ratio of 8.5. That is the lumpy ingredient — and it explains a paradox in the data: waits peak at 39–42 minutes between late morning and mid-afternoon, yet recreational arrivals barely rise then. The midday pain is not a recreational rush. It is two things layered onto the steady hum:
Honesty note: these are August numbers — peak season, 30 days. Off-season recreational demand will thin and likely get lumpier (fair-weather Saturdays vs dead Tuesdays) while the tug fleet keeps its weekday rhythm; this page updates as the archive grows.
Total passage time is queue + chamber. The chamber cycle is fixed physics — ~17 minutes in the small lock, and in a month of records no boat of any kind cleared in under 10 minutes. So the entire game is the queue: median 8 minutes when things go your way, an hour-plus when they don't. Four decisions control it.
Measured medians, arrival to clear: ~21 minutes after 7 pm, 28 at 7 am, 39–42 from late morning to mid-afternoon. The midday peak is only partly recreational volume (which actually peaks 8–10 am and 4–6 pm, commuter style) — it is mostly the commercial priority window. Early and late beats the middle, every day of the week.
Commercial vessels lock first by federal rule and do not share the small lock with recreational boats. The measured cost: if a commercial vessel locked through in the 15 minutes before you arrived, your median queue doubled (24 vs 12 minutes at midday; 14 vs 5 in the evening). Two of those events are on a timetable — the Goodtime III at ~11:24 toward the lakes and ~13:59 toward the Sound, daily, ±6 minutes. Give those windows twenty minutes of clearance. The live forecast flags scheduled vessels and watches approaching tugs by AIS; the working tug fleet runs weekdays only, so weekend commercial exposure is roughly half.
The counterintuitive one. Seeing a lockage depart and hustling in behind it is the worst arrival: boats arriving within 10 minutes of a door-closing waited a median of 50 minutes (even the luckiest tenth waited ~30) — you've just missed the boat, literally, and a big departing batch usually marks a rush period, not a drained queue. Arrive 35+ minutes after the last cycle in your direction and the median falls to ~24 with a realistic floor near 12. The live page's "fastest possible passage" card computes exactly this from the latest records, including which level the chamber is resting at (worth another ~2 minutes).
When the green light comes, the lockmaster loads whoever is ready. Lines rigged bow and stern on both sides (you don't pick your wall), fenders out, crew briefed — before you're called. Fumbling a loading doesn't cost you minutes; it costs you the next ~22-minute cycle. Details in the transit guide.
The two chambers run different rules. The small lock is strictly first-come, first-served by arrival order, and boaters respect it no matter where each boat idles in the waiting area — so your position in line is fixed the moment you arrive, and circling aggressively near the gates buys nothing. The large lock loads the biggest recreational boats first (they take the wall and tend lines); smaller boats then raft alongside them — usually the easier ride, since you tie to a hull instead of working wall lines. Small boat sent to the big lock? That's typically good news, not bad.
| Scenario | Typical arrival-to-clear |
|---|---|
| 7:30 pm, no commercial, chamber due, rigged and ready | 11–18 min |
| Random summer arrival (the 30-day median) | 27 min |
| 11:30 am behind the tour boat on a July Saturday | 45–60+ min |
Same boat, same locks — the spread between the first and last row is pure strategy. Check the live forecast before you cast off; it runs this playbook against the current state of the locks automatically.