s our 31-foot Cape George cutter, Ganymede, sailed
across the Strait of Belle Isle with a brisk one-reef
breeze on her starboard quarter, I thought to myself
that we were leaving the wildest, loneliest place we
would ever visit. Though it has a few concentrations
of population, Newfoundland is generally sparsely
settled in comparison with Nova Scotia or Maine or
pretty much anywhere else we’ve ever been. Even the acres upon
acres of steaming, remote rainforest on the south coast of Pan-
ama host more towns and villages than Newfoundland’s Great
Northern Peninsula, where the ghosts and bones of abandoned
whaling and cod-fi shing camps are easier to fi nd than harbors
with actual people.
Our last few stops in Newfoundland — Quirpon, Cape Onion
and Savage Cove — seemed to have more empty houses than oc-
cupied ones, and we talked to fewer than 10 people between all
three. Savage Cove was swallowed up in fog as Danielle, my wife,
steered Ganymede across the Strait of Belle Isle toward Blanc-
Sablon, a hamlet on the border of Quebec and Labrador. We
had spent the summer cruising ever northward to the top of the
Great Northern Peninsula, and had cut the season slightly fi ner
than was perhaps prudent. It had been a bad season for gales, the
local fi shermen said time and again, and
we were relieved to be making southing
toward warmer climates before the real
fall storms could set in.
We were in the northeast part of the
Gulf of St. Lawrence, which, due to
winds funneling through the Strait of
Belle Isle and weather coming up from
the south to meet it, is its own special
forecast region in the VHF weather
broadcasts. The stretch of Quebec’s
coast before us, from Blanc-Sablon to
Cape Whittle, is lined by an archipelago
of islands packed densely together and
riddled with narrow channels wending
here and there among them, often pro-
viding miles of sheltered inland water to
any sailor who feels adventurous enough
to wiggle in.
We were not feeling particularly adventurous as we ap-
proached the coast; we’d had plenty of adventure in the last fi ve
months. We simply wanted to get along as quickly as possible
before things got too cold. Alas, this coast is fraught with ad-
venture, and we endured more than one before all was said and
done. It began in the fi rst tiny cove we entered. Surrounded by
low, round, rocky islets, we saw little to distinguish one opening
in the rocks from the next, and we avoided the wrong one at
the last moment, after changing our minds about it six times.
GPS is not much help in this remote stretch of Quebec be-
cause the ancient charts and actual geography don’t match up.
The GPS fi x is sometimes on, usually off and generally incon-
sistent. It made for some interesting foggy mornings as we tried
to wend along narrow, unbuoyed passages between submerged
rocks. Taking compass bearings didn’t help much because iron
deposits under the seabed pull the magnets this way and that,
making constant vigilance an absolute must. The best thing to
do, we found as we wove through hammering rain into Baie des
Esquimaux, was to use the GPS merely for a true heading, and
extrapolate position bearings from that.The scenery here could not have been more diff erent from
that of Newfoundland. While the latter had been all green
woods, sharp gray cliff s and deep, fj ordlike indentations, here
the hills were more rounded, the granite almost always pink,
and the vegetation limited to small, stunted bushes and tundra-
like, colorful mosses — often more than knee-deep. What stood
out most along this coast was the unbelievable number of water-
falls. Everywhere we looked were roaring cascades and foaming
watercourses. One narrow harbor had so many waterfalls that
there was quite a strong current fl owing out of it, just a few hun-
dred yards in from the open sea.
There are far fewer settlements along this coast than in New-
foundland, and all of them are “outports,” meaning they’re
accessible only by water, when the ice allows. A few of them are
visited by bush planes landing on gravel strips, and some have a
5-mile or so loop of road, usually connecting the ferry landing
to the actual settlement. Each of the three villages we visited
in the 200 miles of rockbound coast between Blanc-Sablon and
Natashquan was unique in its own way, though peopled by the
same Irish descendants as Newfoundland. Rivière-Saint-Paul,
nestled between hills at the mouth of a long river that empties
into the sheltered waters of Baie des Esquimaux, was our fi rst
taste of civilization.
It was a wet day. The long arm of
Tropical Storm Gabrielle, passing far
to seaward in the North Atlantic, had
contributed a deluge that left me and
the cabin mostly soaked as I popped in
and out between chart and cockpit, try-
ing to pilot Ganymede safely past dozens
of identical islands in the tortuous ap-
proach. It was a pleasant surprise, as I
trudged along a sturdy boardwalk, to see
houses not battered and tumbledown,
but as tidy and well-kept as in any sea-
side town that depends on tourists for
its keep. Everything looked fastidiously
maintained and clean, like in a quaint
Maine lobster village. I couldn’t fathom
what anyone did here, since there wasn’t
a fi shing fl eet, and it was obvious that
tourists and even cruising sailors were a rarity.
We weren’t there long enough to fi nd out. The one person I
met, who gave me a lift to buy fuel ($8 a gallon!) and groceries,
was a fur trapper who worked the river for mink, otter and musk-
rat, but that didn’t seem to be the universal employment. As with
everywhere else pleasant we’d been, we would have liked to have
more time to stay, but there was a fair breeze forecast for the
next day, and such things are not to be wasted so late in the short
northern season.
I use the term “fair breeze” to mean only that it was going the
same direction we were. There was rather too much of it, espe-
cially when we left the shelter of the scattered islands west of
Baie des Esquimaux. It was under storm trysail and reefed stay-
sail that we whooshed into our next harbor to wait out the rest
of the blow — a Parthian shot from the departing tropical storm.
The next morning we had only a few hours of quiet to get to an-
other hidey-hole and hunker down again for a gale from the
opposite direction.
So it went on the coast of Quebec: We would snatch a few
miles when we could during the interludes, then scurry into aFEBRUARY2016cruisingworld.com62
Harrington Island is so small, it has boardwalks instead of roads (top right). People there get around with four-wheelers and
sleds (top left). Some of the islands and coves we explored didn’t even have names (bottom right). Passages between rocks
were sometimes so narrow that we could touch the cliff s on each side with a boathook (bottom left).