From Port-au-Choix to St Anothy (strait of Belle-Isle 3)

 

We have to time our leaving Port-au-Choix: there is a big messy thingy over the Gulf of St Lawrence, (the remanents of TropicalStorm Debbie ? ) and we are juuuuust North  of it  (pic below is actual windspeed, we are where a green arrow shows 10 knots, fine, but where it is purple – you don’t want to be sailing in there ). If we leave and the boundary moves North, we might be in trouble.  We decide to wait out another night. Next day, reveille at 06:00 am – last refresh of the forecast in the drizzle, boots and foulies, a tea, and off we are.

We are where the green"10"is. All the purple mess stopped creeping North...  

For this leg,  we will be in the thick  of things, the core of Belle-Isle Strait, where it gets narrow (about 10 Nautical miles wide).  The opposite shore is the coast of Labrador – a hint that we brush territories that are out of our usual geographic sphere.  the Labrador current flows South, and raises a steep sea against the prevailing southwest winds.  We have a plan – stop in red Bay, on Labrador coast – but we also have a tactic – be  opportunistic.

 

The weather is actually clearing up and as forecasted (a medium-strong SouthWest). Eric believes in the forecast, he seems to derive some internal certainty from it. This is a new and refreshing attitude to me; always the paranoid and the sceptical. But I am the skipper, it is also my duty to keep preparing for the worse. Gobineau has interesting words about this. Let me quote it (in English !) "At sea, the captain and his officers, feeling the weigh of their responsibility, are never enttirely free. If not of anxieties, if not of troubles, at least of very real concern. They spend their lives looking around them and thinking about what they see and do not see. Apart from the accidents brought about by the wind and waves, it is never certain at sea that one will never meet another ship at night, or if not a ship, an ice-floe. Near a coast, a miscalculation, a moment of inattention, the effect of current, a thousand causes can force ths ship aground. Even when the ship is at anchor, if the mooring is not safe, a cable broken in bad weather is sufficient to put everything in jeopardy".

We watch the sea temperature, that would give a clue when meeting the Labrador current, but the water temperature remains surprisingly  high, around 14 degrees (off Nova Scotia, it was down to 11 degrees). 

There is a little traffic in the Strait: we saw some cargo ships, and of course the ubiquitous Newfoundland costal trawlers, our harbor companions. 

We are making fast progresses, and by the afternoon, we reach the narrow part of the strait. There are a few signs that the place can be challenging – for instance, we come across a race, that creates some nasty chop, but would probably create a real challenge in stronger winds.

 

We are moving faster that we had planned to (was the plan made by a pessimist ?), and keep refreshing our projections and options as we progress. For instance, it is now clear that if we call in Red Bay (on Labrador coast) we might miss those favorable conditions (the wind will shift tomorrow). So we decide to press on and turn the corner (cape Norman) and forgo the stop in Labrador. But this also means that we it will be nighttime when we reach l’AnseAuxMeadows,  and St Lunaire, so it won’t be practical to stop there.  L’Anse is the place where the Vikings settled originally around year 1000, and Eric as myself were very keen to see it with our own eyes.  During a later pub conversation,  we realized that we both experienced the same feelings as we were watching the coast go by during our respective night watch, as Sélune was cruising in from of l’Anse:  the that what we were seeing  – dark silhouettes of buffs on the coast – was exactly what Leif Ericsson and his aclolytes saw.

Early next morning, we are around the Northern tip of Newfoundland. We now  have to beat against the wind to reach StAnthony, it actually gets sporty as we close to the harbor (again – high cliffs, high winds). Once in, we find a good shelter – the place lacks of charm, but we do have a decent anchoring spot (by now, we are accustomed to feel our way without super-precise information from the charts; for instance we have to do a couple of hard turns  – “you see this seagull ? it STANDS on something….”) . We had somehow the hope that we could rent a car and travel to l’Anse, but no luck there. That will be a one-night stop.

As you can see we are quite choosy when it comes to anchoring. What the plotter does not shows is a few bumps...