Under full stream

The prudent sailor takes information where she can get it. This port-to-port distance chart helped in our passage planning, although I had to squint.

Day 31 to Day 39: Quebec City, QC to Tadoussac, QC (days 18 to 19 of sailing)

We came and went through the city of Montreal without, save for a bike trip to a chart shop by Mrs. Alchemy across the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, with little touristic activity. Partially, this was due to our habit of sticking to the Seaway/big ship channel rather than diverting to "downtown" yacht clubs, and partially this was because we wanted to avoid crowds and, we hoped, COVID. We were determined not to pick up the bug not only due to the potential health risks, but because two weeks stuck on a boat ill was a worse alternative than two weeks stuck on a boat in self-isolation once we reached the "Atlantic Bubble" and a reasonable prospect of making our appointment with our winter shipyard destination.

Thanks to the magic of cross-referencing charts, I was able (in French, yet) to obtain the correct model to restock our spares.

So while the Montreal south-side suburb of Longueuil had the ability to meet our needs, we didn't actually see much of Montreal itself. Quebec City was different: it's more compact and while the opportunities for tourism per se were considerably muted this year, and rightly so, we did get to see a fair bit of it.

The housing on parts of Boulevard Champlain beneath the Cliffs of Insanity below the Plains of Abraham struck me as dangerously hopeful in terms of not getting a boulder through the attic.

We have found our decison to bring bicycles aboard vindicated, even though special care had to be taken to turn handlebars sideways, to watch for lines snagging and to secure them to the rails. Grocery getting involved backpacks and bungee cords and sweat: Quebec City is plateaus and hills and cliffs for the most part and the narrowness of the shoreline on the river, so critical to its defense when run by the French, means almost any provisioning is going to involve a steep climb uphill and the smell of wearing brake pads on the return leg. While the actual sea air downriver from Quebec City certainly began to affect the bicycles in terms of corrosion, the benefits of not having to take public transit (where available) or taxis (ditto for the smaller places) have been significant, as has the chance to see from the saddle the more ordinary parts of town. And our legs and lungs are fitter than when we moved aboard.

"Leave out the back way" is not an option.

The Yacht Club de Québec, once we found it, its seawall rocks composed of boulders the same colour as the surrounding cliffs, was a very nice place and we finally got to have a socially distanced brunch instead of whatever we could grill up in the galley. Also access to decent showers, a laundry not closed by COVID and a proper chandlery nearby were all huge pluses.

Lucas and his beloved poutine in an otherwise empty cafe in old Québec

We had a "medical incident" when we were asked to change docks after a much-needed refuelling. Backing down, I came a little too close to the stern rail of a docked boat, and she attemptied to fend off, cutting her thumb in the process. She freely admitted that it was unwise to put her hand between a moving (if ever so slowly) 16-tonne vessel such as ours and another boat and wrapped it up until we were back at dock. But when your animal rehabber wife tells you she required stitches, it was likely the case.

Why a thumb makes a poor fender.

A nice man from a nearby boat named Georges drove us to the closest hospital, which happened to be part of the University of Laval, and we waited about five hours to be seen. The actual stitching took about five minutes and Becky reports a "99%" recovery. The Québec health care system (despite the wait, there were more serious cases in front of us) seemd pretty efficient and cost us, as in our home province, nothing, but we were glad to get back to the boat that night.

Drive directly onto le chariot du bateau

One of the interesting sights at any yacht club is how they handle the practicalities of boat handling. In a strongly tidal place like Québec City, they favour the ramp and tractor over the Travelift approach. This consists of driving a wheeled frame at an appropriate state of tide and wind down a long ramp, driving the boat into said frame, lashing the boat to the frame and hauling it to wherever it needs to go in the yard. How they get the boat off the frame and onto jackstands or blocks wasn't clear, but it was mesmerizing to watch it done.

Regardez ce premier virage à gauche, et bonne chance!

On one of my Tour de France assaults grocery gets, not only did I take note of the beautiful neighbourhoods of the plateau's Sillery and Bergerville areas, but I also found a few interesting bits of signage. I believe, for instance, this is how my last name sounds in French, although it is an Anglicization of an Irish tribal name, I got to hear it read back to me all through la belle province.

If you are reading this on a phone, it says "Avenue Désy"

Around the corner was a little bit of horrible history and again, from a car, you'd miss these sort of things.

Seemed fishy to me.

Regardless, provisioned, rebolted, recovering and provided a pre-dawn tidal window (this was now a constant consideration in when we would leave a place, tempered by how far we thought we could get), we departed the city and headed ever eastward with an increasing compontent of north. Even a disconnected vent line on the shaft seal that put an alarming, but easily pumped out, amount of nearly Atlantic Ocean into the bilges was discovered and dealt with.

Sure, for you, this is a light jog. For Alchemy, it was a new record

We spent the first two to three  hours of our journey to Cap-a-d'Aigle, some 77 NM downriver, hammering into contrary tide with a side of wind that kept our speed down to about 4 knots. We did this to catch the turn of the tide partway around the south side of Ile d'Orleans, the large island in the St. Lawrence NE of Quebec City and to reach the "choke point" of L'isle-aux-Coudres. We had been counselled back at the club to go past this island at slack time, or at least with the last of it at our backs as it was very difficult to challenge the current at this spot.

This was with the current. Given my RPM at this point, I should have been doing maybe 6.2 knots.

That prospect was perhaps undersold. We had a ridiculous if rocky run and kept breaking speed records as we peeled around the end of d'Orleans.

Oh, you've got to be kidding me.

We got around the purported area of concern at about 8 knots, still fast, but manageable.  Cap-a-l'Aigle's marina was one of those that is hard to see  until you are practically on it, but it was in a beautiful, if increasingly rugged, setting.

Behold, the dawn cloud dragon.

The next day dawned very calmly, which allowed for an easy departure to Tadoussac. The river opens out considerably at this point and is some 10 miles across, so we could choose which "chenal" to take as there were far fewer concerns about depth and the buoyage remained excellently maintained, another reason we tended to stick to the shipping lanes.

Perfect for spotting whales. And seals. And gannets.

The run to Tadoussac was less than half of the previous day's tidal-current-boosted passage, but in reviewing the charts, I was a little concerned about the confluence of the Saguenay and St.  Lawrence Rivers in terms of the way the tide and current came out of the former fjord-like river at differing and sometimes contrary rates to that of the St. Lawrence. So, as has been so often the case, I had one eye on the clock and another on the river.

Seriously, an unusually calm day to drive a boat

Which is how I first glimpsed, even from the semi-restricted view from inside the pilothouse, my first whale dorsal fin since I was delivery crew on Bruce and June Clark's Bristol 45.5, Ainia, way back in 2009.

Lucas and Becky had spotted them, too, and this was about the first time I noticed the lack of a telephoto lens aboard. We lost count around 20 or so, and we also spotted a seal mum with a head the size of a garbage bin, and her cuter offspring, who was wearing a sort of kelp beret, as one does...alas, no footage as we were among other boats and had to focus on not hitting animals or vessels. As a side note, all those eyeballs forward caused me to notice what looked like a telephone pole vertically floating in the water, about 30 cm. above it. So I reported it to the Coast Guard, because that could seriously dent a sailboat.

Tadoussac is a busy place for sailing as well as whale-watching, and is very beautiful in spots.

We arrived at Tadoussac in the early afternoon, and after a bit of an issue finding our assigned dock, we settled in for some R&R. This was the place to do it, a village of 700 or so that swelled to service the tourism industry to about 3000. There's even a microbrewery. More in our next post.

Yes, the tide and the marina happily co-exist with that steep a slope in the channel.

The widening gyre

Oh, how could we not pick up a few tins of this? It was actually very tasty.

Day 23 to Day 30: Sorel, QC to Quebec City, QC (days 14 to 17 of sailing)

With the rudder pin repair holding, we ventured east of Montreal to Sorel, QC. Travelling down the St. Lawrence Seaway for us has generally involved daylight-only travel with a large component of motoring. This is because the Seaway is full of a mix of commercial shipping and weekend warriors on jet skis and power boats shedding large wakes. It is also depth-constrained in many places beyond the buoyed channel. This makes for relatively easy, if 'busy' navigation, and the need to phone ahead to ensure marinas and yacht clubs are a) open at all in the time of COVID; and b) open to us on any given night; and c) have enough depth at low tide (which becomes a factor around Trois-Rivières, about midway between Montreal and Quebec City.

Mrs. Alchemy's affection for her fresh herbs made for some improved dinners aboard.

We were on the St. Lawrence long enough to see some of the same ships coming and going. For a summer with a pandemic and a Montreal dockworkers' strike, we saw no dearth of shipping.

An 'easy' day at this point was under 50 NM (about 100 km. or seven to eight hours of cruising with the river current's aid). A more ambitious day would add 10 to 20 NM to that total and would often necessitate leaving at dawn and arriving at dusk.

A daily sight on the St. Lawrence River and we were sure to maintain a respectable distance.

Ships going either way on the river were invariably cautious with us and we returned the favour by either holding our course as far over in our "lane' as possible, or, where depths permitted, going out of the channel briefly to allow two ships going in opposition directions to pass each other without us in the mix.

I do not understand the rationale of anchoring ships in a river on standby, but we passed a lot of them that clearly hadn't moved in some time.

Sorel-Tracy at sundown

Civilian pleasure craft, on the other hand, are numerous in this part of Quebec and exhibit varying degrees of seamanship. PWC (jetskis) were more annoying than dangerous to us, but 40 foot planing power boats would often pass too close and rock us with their excessive wakes. In some places, particularly on weekend days, whole flotillas of these sort of speedboats would pass us as if we weren't there. We saw very few sailboats of our size in transit on the river, just small daysailers in places where the river allowed a little room to cruise.

In the picture to the right, we can just be made out by our mast with its Furuno radome and our green mainsail cover. This is at the Parc Nautique Sorel-Tracy, which had a wicked-looking rock just at its entrance, and at which we first noticed that it was getting harder to find bilingual Francophones, meaning we had to revive our own morbid French in order to ask questions about depth at dock (profondeur) and the type of fuel sold.

The next day, August 8, was just as beautiful as the previous one, so we proceeded to Trois-Rivières, a place we found both beautiful and good for stocking up, so we stayed at the pleasant Marina de Trois-Rivières, where we met a variety of interesting sailors (the river was getting wider and more sailboat-friendly) and got in some needed exercise biking around town. We also did our laundry in a nearby cafe (the marina laundry was, as was often the case, by COVID measures and we showered on a converted houseboat instead of in the marina building itself). That pair of espressos while we were waiting was the first 'restaurant' experience we had had while in Quebec, and was a test of our French, which didn't evidently shine when heard through Sunbrella face masks.

Approaching Trois-Riviers: I hope those containers aren't carrying perishable goods because this Don wasn't moving..

I was interested in Trois-Rivières not only as the best provisioning stop before Quebec City, itself the last city prior to Halifax in Nova Scotia, but for a minor if real connection to the place. My grandfather, Ted Davies, was an Irish immigrant to Canada in the mid-1920s. His education at Trinity College, Dublin, had given him a reasonable command of French, and some officer cadet training as a teenager gave him a clue about things military. So, despite being, at age 36 and with two children, positively elderly in 1939, he was readily accepted as a volunteer to the Canadian army. He went from private to company sergeant-major rapidly and, as he was a very good shot, spent the war as a weapons instructor to an English-speaking regiment in the morning and a French-speaking one in the afternoon. My mother spent ages 5 to 11 as an 'Army brat', and one of the places my grandfather served was Trois-Rivières. Evidently, she picked up French quickly, as children do, and promptly lost it when her father was stationed back in Ontario. Such are the fortunes of war, apparently. My own French is better today than when I spent a month in Lyon in 1981 'immersed', but still means I sound like a rather unpromising five-year-old in most exchanges, more is the pity.

The bridge over the St. Lawrence at Trois-Rivières

The marina at which we stayed was essentially in a park that was once owned, as so many places have been in Quebec, by the church. It was a short bike ride up a path and over a bridge to reach "the town" and its services. Once again, COVID knocked out most touristic opportunities, but we noticed that the confluence of the rivers and the general look of the place were both pleasant and prosperous.

Because the marina, like most places this year, was underused, there was a slight air of neglect surrounding this sad scene.

Prosperity, however, tends to be unevenly distributed. This wasn't the first place we saw abandoned boats, and this stout little ketch, run aground at high tide at the end of the Marina basin, was no exception.


By the same token, and it may seem a little naive to remark upon this as a person who spends a lot of time in yacht clubs, affluence is also relative. In front of us at Marina de Trois-Rivières was something called a Prestige 630 motor yacht. It was the largest pleasure craft we knowingly saw to date, although there may have been a larger converted tug or something similar I didn't recognize as a private vessel. It's got four foot seven inch draft (tirant d'eau, locally) and over 23 feet "air draft", which means it can't go under a lot of bridges. It weighs twice what our steel sailboat weighs, which is saying something, and gets 10 litres to the mile in fuel burn for a range of 270 NM. We carry about 380 l of diesel and can cruise under motor for about five times that distance. Different world. The first time we saw it move was when it bellied up to the fuel dock here, although we would see the boat later in the trip at Rivière-au-Renard in the Gaspesie. Yours for two million.

The big yacht would helpfully block out the sun in the mornings.

Pax Dei, in beautiful nick

We would see another Westsail 32 a few weeks later. Figures, they are indestructable.

Most people who mess about in boats are, contrary to popular opinion, are of more modest means. Their boats are cottages, or even floating homes in retirement, and the amenities tend toward the spartan. Trois-Rivieres had a few of these, including a beautfully kept Westsail 32, Pax Dei.

Because some marinas and yacht clubs are built in "non-commercial" areas, they can be quite verdant.

After some remediation aboard, includingour 250 hour of engine runtime change of oil, change of air filter, and change of oil filter (which didn't sit properly and sprayed oil about the engine bay), we found a clog of weeds in the Perko seawater strainer circuit. We replaced the impeller and cleaned out everything and eventually restored prime. That and a tightening up of the rudder pin repair made us seaworthy, or at least river-ready, once again and it was time to hie off to Quebec City.

Go with the flow, they said.

But tidal effects were beginning to manifest eastbound, and this had to be taken into account. We spoke with Maurice, an experienced sailor on the dock, who gave us some tips on how to negotiate the Richelieu Rapids, a rather dramatic narrowing of the St. Lawrence River after a long stretch of largely placid progress at the best place to stop the night before Quebec City, Portneuf.

Said placidity. Too calm to sail, even were we so inclined.

Due to a paucity of Canadian Hydrological Service navigation charts (they are being, stupidly in my view, phased out in favour of "on demand printing", which is rare to find), we were using "Trakmaps", printed nautical chartbooks that, while expensive, allowed us to preview routes and make decisions about distances in a way somehow more tactile than playing around with the plotter.

Thanks for such a tiny wake, Mr. Big Ships I Wish to Avoid.

We knew we wished to approach the rapids at slack tide, because the river's current at that point would accelerate us a fair bit (in fact, we hit a new speed-over-ground record of 10.1 knots at that was at a creeping along RPM of 1400!). We also knew that the yacht club at which we wanted to stay was pretty near the end of the rapids and we would be steering obliquely across the current. And we didn't want to go through with ships of the size seen above anywhere near us. So timing was important.

The charts indicated all sorts of places we could tear out our bottom. Not calming.

So were nerves...this is the inside view of the S-shaped breakwater walls, based on a design by the noted architect Sauron, and it was tricksy coming and going. Those walls, by the way, suggest the ever-increasing tidal range by this point.

Delvic, a really nice metal boat with an unusual choice in her wooden rig at Portneuf

Yacht Club de Québec, an excellent base from which to explore, pardon the inadvertent camera setting

But the club itself was nice and allowed us a decent sleep before the drive (more traffic, more bridges and more current) into the beautiful city of Québec, more of which will be related in our next post.