Enetai - St Lawrence Cruise, 2014: Mallets Bay Vermont to Shediac New Brunswick
Revised 1 May 2015: Added videos to narrative.
5 Weeks, 934 nautical miles
The big picture: This 5 week cruise is the beginning of what we hope will be a circumnavigation of New England and parts of Atlantic Canada, stretched out over several years. This year's cruise started in Lake Champlain and went North and East in a clockwise direction. Next year (hopefully) we will head South from the same launching point down the Hudson and out along the New England coast in a counterclockwise direction. In a third leg we will close the circle.
Almost the entire cruise this summer was through French speaking Canada. I don't speak any French. Gina dusted off (and improved!) her high school French. The Canadians we met were, with a few exceptions, far more proficient in English than either of us in French (Gina is sure she made their ears hurt as they nearly always switched to English after her first sentence). We had only a few instances where communication was a problem.
We were surprised at how few boats from the US we saw in Canada - in fact we saw only two, which bracketed our travels; The "Soca Girl", a large trawler yacht we followed 'down' the Chambly Canal (she was headed west, up the St. Lawrence), and "Anne's Odyssey", a large sailboat we came across in Shediac (she had lost her rig overboard and was waiting on an insurance adjuster and a new rig). Actually, there were not many Canadian boats, recreational or otherwise, enjoying the waterways either. The marinas were pretty well occupied but not many boats were on the move. The wind and chop may have had something to do with that.
Our 26 foot Norwalk Islands Sharpie was the smallest boat out on the St Lawrence except for the occasional weekend motorboat outside of a harbor fishing. Our boat felt particularly small during some rough conditions on the river, when we envyed those larger boats that we did see. We pounded through a few very uncomfortable tide rips. We had to reef early and reef often in the strong winds we encountered. On the other hand, her light weight and trailerability made the trip possible. No point in having a great sea-boat if you can't get her to where you want to cruise. Being able to raise and lower the mast without a crane was also a big advantage. I should note that we read the travelogues of Reinhard Zollitsch who cruised the same waters in a sea canoe which makes our boat seem positively luxurious. It's all a matter of perspective.
We decided to leave our hard dinghy at home. Looking at the charts it appeared that there would be very few opportunities to anchor or take a mooring along the route. The dinghy would be a liability in marinas and locks. Instead, we bought an inflatable kayak off Craig's List. The kayak stowed in a cockpit locker along with paddles, pumps, etc. We only had three occasions where the kayak came out of the locker but we were glad to have it when we needed it.
In preparation for the trip, we bought a whole stack of paper charts and a few guide books. We consider the charts to be essential, not just because we can't put 100% of our faith in the chart plotter, nor simply because Canadian regulations require all boats to have paper charts. (They do.) We prefer paper charts to the electronic alternatives for getting the big picture and seeing what's ahead. The essential guide book for this cruise was "ST. LAWERENCE RIVER AND QUEBEC WATERWAYS, 2nd edition" (2009), published by L'Escale Nautique, Quebec. This guide book covered our whole route and has excellent detail. See the REFERENCE page for more information
We had a DeLorme inReach satellite communicator on board. This device tracks where you are (the map at the top of this page is from the device) and the InReach can send out a rescue signal if you get in trouble. A website allows friends to see where you are and to send text messages to the device. The two-way text messaging service was very nice to have. It also pins your message to the map. We had a smart-phone on board with a Canadian SIM card but did not always have service, however it could communicate with the InReach via blue-tooth allowing for much easier typing of short messages. The InReach allowed us to keep in touch with our daughter who was in Uganda on a service program. This was particularly helpful when she broke her wrist towards the end of our trip and had to fly back to the US for surgery.
- We have illustrated this narrative with photographs of some of our charts from the trip. These photographs are not suitable for navigation.
- We make no apology for folding the charts.☺
- Although this narrative seems to be mostly in Bo's voice, both of us put time and effort into it.