Newfoundland Flotilla: St. Anne des Monts

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You want to go WHERE?
Quebec City
Cape of Eagles
Rimouski
Matane
St. Anne des Monts
Riveire Renard
Iles de la Madeleine
Isle aux Mort
Sainte Pierre aux Miquelan
Trepassy
St. John's
Conception Bay
Heading Home









Andy's comments:
Being the total computer geek that I am, I had to have as much electronic hardware with me as reasonable for this trip. For a computer, I settled on my trusty HP200 palmtop computer. After a bit of fiddling with the many cables that I brought, I finally came upon a system for entering waypoints into the HP, then downloading them to both Jay’s and my handheld GPS (both Garmin). After that was finished, I’d carry my palmtop over to Geoff’s GPS and enter the waypoints manually. So, passages would generally start out with me sitting over the chart for 45 minutes or so plotting courses and getting waypoints. I don’t know if Jay knows it or not, but several times I found typos in my waypoints after being at sea for several hours!
 

 
Before the trip, Geoff told us on the phone that he had "a lot of soup" on board to cook. Both Jay and I thought that sounded somewhat uncreative. When we got there, we found that like any good Irishman, Geoff could not have a meal without his spuds, so generally meals consisted of soup (which we found was excellent), potatoes, and something else. It never got boring, and believe me, Geoff knows how to cook his spuds!
 

 
I think this was one of the more memorable events in the trip, and one that I still tell stories about to try to illustrate the amazing response we got at every port along the trip. As we approached where we thought the harbor entrance was, we started to see increasing numbers of white lights through the fog. We had no idea what they might be, but assumed they were probably lights in the town, and were generally in the direction we needed to be going. As we approached, we saw that they were the headlights of a veritable parking lot full of cars, all there just to show us the way to the harbor. We were all touched by this first gesture of kindness by the people of Saint Anne des Monts – certainly one of many. As we passed the cars entering the harbor, I couldn’t avoid thinking of the times that the locals had done the same thing for their own fishermen – guiding them safely into harbor through dark and stormy Canadian night
 

 
The skipper of our "fender" put out our bow anchor, using his dinghy. By the time the operation started, the winds were already just about as high as they had ever been, and he had a hell of a time getting our fisherman anchor out. Somewhere during the operation, up to his knees in water in his dinghy and holding our anchor, he bumped his head on our bowsprit. Cursing, "I hate bowsprits! I’ll never have one on a boat of mine", he didn’t exactly enamour himself with Geoff, who was standing on the bow at the time. Geoff never forgot it – an insult to Inishfree was an insult to Geoff. The guy was on his shit list until the end of the voyage.

St. Anne des Monts
The next morning we woke to the sound of rain hammering the topsides and stepped outside in full foul weather gear into a bleak cold gray wet dawn. Our next destination, Sainte Anne des Monts, was only 40 nm away but with the weather as nasty as it was it seemed a lot farther.

The water was so lumpy that we had to short tack along the coast to make any headway at all. It rained the entire day with the wind getting up to around 18 knots always on the nose. I say around because Geoff had no wind instruments at all, or knot meter or depth sounder, and not even a windex at the masthead. He would make comments like; "I don’t need a windex because I know where the winds are coming from." Or, "By the time a depth sounder tells you how little water you have you have already run aground." The reality was that Geoff was totally paranoid about having any more thru-hulls than absolutely necessary. We did have three GPS’s aboard though!

By this time we had started a job routine. Andy took on the primary navigation chores and I would back him up by checking some of his work and going over alternatives with him. I became the boat driver and Geoff would do the housekeeping chores including cooking and bottle washing. What a great skipper! Andy and I did not do dishes once on the entire trip! What a team.

We arrived off Saint Anne des Monts (pronounced du Mond) at 1600. It was so dark and gray that lights were already on in town. A huge church with twin steeples marked the harbor. There were people in cars with their headlights on to guide us to the entrance. As we passed through the jetty several of them blasted their horns in greeting!

This was the first harbor that did not have enough slips for all the boats so we got in line to raft up. The wind was still blowing fairly hard and as we were given our directions to the dock another boat cut in front of us to take our spot so I backed off and waited until they had secured their boat before rafting next to them. I was a little pissed off but Geoff, with a cooler head than mine, reminded me that they would be the ones acting as the fender between us and the dock. How prophetic that turned out to be. The wind was dead on their beam pinning them to the windward side of the dock.

It was a tricky job to get us up alongside them. The dock was L shaped with the boats on the inside of the L. The spot we had been given was right at the right angle turn which meant I had to run along parallel to the line of boats already tied up with the wind on my stern then make a hard right turn to immediately lay up alongside our raft. As I made the approach I had to keep the boat in reverse just to slow me down and then with some good throttle and gear work I made the turn, got the boat stopped and kept the bow from being blown down on the other boat.

We were lucky to get in when we did. Less than 30 minutes later the wind had increased to 30+ knots. The boats in the marina where jumping up and down and swinging side to side while people scrambled to put more fenders out and get anchors into the water to help hold the boats off the docks and each other. Our boat was in direct line with the harbor entrance, so we also had to contend with the rising waves marching one after another into the marina. Now I was really glad we were not the boat on the inside of the raft. Geoff was right, the other guy made a great fender for us!

The wind and rain increased through the night with the wind gusting at times in the 40’s. The skipper of our ‘fender’ did not have the equipment or skills to handle this kind of situation. He kept trying to talk us into moving our boat somewhere else so that he would not have to be on the inside of the raft. We did not remind him that it was his choice to cut in front of us so he could be alongside the dock.  We took as much pressure off of him as we could with a bow anchor and lines to another part of the dock. We knew we were in for a night of Rock and Roll! He and Geoff were up during the night resetting fenders and lines.

In the morning a survey of Inishfree revealed virtually no damage to us and only a couple of burst fenders to the other guy. We did have some chafe and our bow line was down to one strand left out of three but compared to the damage the rest of the flotilla sustained during the night we got off scott free.

We spent most of the morning just staying out of the nasty weather down below in the boat. The wind finally started shifting some and coming down to a reasonable breeze. We took a walk into town and had a lunch of pizza, beer and smoked salmon at the Pub Bass. Andy saw a Corona sign on the wall that had a Jimmy Buffett flavor to it. He tried to cut a deal with the owner for it but didn’t have any luck. Later that afternoon we attended a skippers meeting where the flotilla got the latest weather information and tried to figure out if we could make it to Riveire Renard (Fox River) during the brief weather window that was expected to open up.


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