David’s Voyage Blog

Publish Date: Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Location: Gaspe, Quebec, Canada
Coordinates: 48° 49.685′ N  64° 28.554′ W

Over the last four days we have traveled about 270 nautical miles from Tadoussac to Gaspe. This probably doesn’t seem like a lot to somebody who owns a car, but it’s a lot for a boat that travels at 6.5-7 knots. We did 100 nautical miles the first day, from Tadoussac to Matane, and then we took a day off for weather. Then we did 100 nm yesterday, going from Matane to Grande Vallee, where we dropped the anchor for the night. Finally, today we did about 70 nm to Gaspe. We’ll take a day off tomorrow to enjoy the town and wait for weather. We had hung back in Tadoussac for a couple days to see what Hurricane Bill was going to do. Once it seemed okay to proceed, we had gotten behind schedule by a few days, so if the weather permitted, we wanted to make some significant progress.

Yesterday’s cruise was geographically significant: We reached the northern apex of our entire voyage, and we began heading south again. When I write “our entire voyage”, I mean the entire four-year voyage: We will never be farther north on our entire circumnavigation as we were yesterday near Gros-Morne, Quebec. We took pictures of the GPS screen, and we had a little “northern celebration” on board.

Yesterday’s cruise was also a wildlife extravaganza. We were greeted by two blue herons flying across our bow as we left Matane harbour at sunrise. We saw several pods of dolphins throughout the day, and a half a dozen individual seals. A large humpback whale cruised along side us for awhile, spouting every couple of minutes as he swam near the surface. But the most unusual sighting of all was a basking shark.

Basking sharks are huge — 25-30 feet long — but harmless to humans. They filter-feed on plankton by swimming with their large mouth open. We saw ours surface a hundred yards off our port bow. At first we thought it was another dolphin, but then we realized the fin was staying persistently at the surface, and it was weaving back and forth in that shark-like way. For just a moment, as the huge beast was heading right for us, I felt like the Orca (the ill-fated boat from Jaws). But then she realized we were here, and changed course and dove. We could see the second dorsal fin and the tail fin as she dove, which made our species identification more certain. That was cool!

When we decided last spring to tackle the “Down East Circle” cruise, we knew it was a long distance to get around the Gaspe Peninsula. We had hoped to be here by the end of August, which would then give us the whole month of September to get back to Maine or Massachusetts. This was all theoretical when we were doing our planning, but here we are, and we’re thrilled that we decided to come. We’re looking forward to a month cruising through the Canadian maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia.