David’s Voyage Blog

Publish Date: Sunday, August 23, 2009
Location: Matane, Quebec, Canada
Coordinates: 48° 51.146′ N  67° 31.832′ W

There are two main seamanship challenges associated with the area we are cruising through: large tides and thick fog. We’ve had plenty of both in the last few days.

The large tides are a challenge for three reasons. First, the flooding and ebbing tides create currents that affect our cruising speed, so it’s important that we time our departures to align with the favorable tidal current as much as possible. Sometimes this means delaying our departure until mid-day, and sometimes it means departing before sunrise, which we did yesterday.

The second challenging thing about the large tides is the water depth at mooring and anchoring sites. We need to make sure the channel depth getting in and out is sufficient for the current state of the tide, and that the anchoring or mooring site has sufficient water under the boat at low tide. We cruised to Matane yesterday, and we couldn’t enter this harbour with less than half tide. And now that we’re here, we can’t leave with less than half tide. Not every place has this kind of depth restrictions, but many do. (It’s also worth noting that at low tide, Three@Sea is sitting on the mud bottom here in Matane harbour.)

Finally, when we tie to a wharf or dock, we need to take into account the large tidal changes. Fortunately, most of the marinas and harbours have floating docks, so we can just tie up normally, and the docks float up and down with the boat. But some harbours only have fixed piers, so we have to use sufficient line to accommodate the tidal change, and we usually have to adjust our lines mid-tide. It’s pretty amazing to see how a harbour changes when the water level changes by 15 feet.

The other main challenge in this area is thick fog. We had our first big encounter with it yesterday when we cruised from Tadoussac to Matane. It wasn’t zero visibility — we could see the surface of the water right in front of the boat — but it was pretty thick. It was supposed to lift by mid-morning, so we decided to head out (after much discussion). We went very slow getting out of the harbour, watching the charts and radar closely, and keeping an eye on the water surface right in front of the boat. We also had our automatic fog horn activated, which works through one of our VHF radios attached to the hailer. The AIS system was also a big help, as there were two 600-foot freighters crossing right in front of us as we pulled out of the harbor. Yes, we could see them on radar, and we could hear their fog horns, but it was nice to know they were there before we could “see” and hear them.

The fog didn’t lift until about 3pm, so we spent most of the day “in the soup”. We had very few radar contacts, probably because it was so foggy, most people decided to stay in port. The most stressful part of the fog for me was leaving port and getting out into the open water. And if the fog had stayed around until evening, we would have encountered similar stress getting into the harbor in Matane. Also, as we move into the areas of the Down East Circle route that have more fishing gear, that will be another concern when cruising in fog: most fishing floats do not show up on radar, so if you can’t see the surface of the water in front of you, you risk running over the fishing gear.

To give you an idea of the tidal changes (and fog), I took the photos below on the same day in Tadassouc Harbour. The first photo of each pair was taken in the morning, at low tide; the second photo of each pair was taken in the afternoon, at high tide. As you can see, by afternoon the fog had also arrived, which is the same fog in which we departed Tadoussac the next morning.