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l'Anse-Saint-Jean (Saguenay)
Current Location: l'Anse-Saint-Jean
Date: June 9
Mile: 556
Locate: Ramble On
Locate: Finnish Line 2.0 |
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| The Lady at a distance |
We had a little boating fun today. Our intended destination for the night was going to be Baie Eternite, where we had stopped for a peaceful night on our way up the fjord. For our return trip, we planned to anchor and take the dinghy ashore to explore the trails, paths and interpretative centre, etc.
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| Notre-Dame-du-Saguenay with zoom lens |
Notre-Dame-du-Saguenay, a 9m tall statue towering 470m off the water at the northwest entrance of the bay. She is high up on the cliffs, but one can hike 3.5 km trail to the site.
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Beautiful local wildlife,
captured with Chris' persistence! |
Again, after some struggle, Finish Line got an anchor set, and again, we rafted, and dropped the dinghy, and hopped aboard and headed to the recently installed dock.
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| Stairway to... |
Once ashore, we followed the path toward "the lady" to see how far/high we could get. Linda stayed back to explore the interpretive centre and see what else there was to see. Bob, Debbie and I continued up the path, which turned into modest uphill hike. The path turned into a hand laid stone staircase, roughly assembled, but still very much a staircase. We all were struck by the amount of effort it must have taken to build stairs on such rugged terrain.
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| Birch getting creative! |
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huge boulder (top left corner)
creates shelter for amphitheater |
After about 30 minutes of climbing we decided that we had sort of had enough, and we turned back. Once we made it back to where we started, we met up with Linda, and we all stared out over the bay at our oddly positioned boats. Something didn't look right. I said "Do we look aground?", to which Linda replied "yup!". Last time, the wind and river current kept us safely out of the shallows at the mouth of the river (ahem! ... not so much this time!)
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| Aground! |
The wind, still light, now coming into the bay, had turned us around and swung us into an unexpected sand bar. The water is coloured like strong tea, and it's hard to "see" any indication of depth changes. We were definitely laying perpendicular to the wind and the light current from the river mouth. We scrambled back into the dinghy and headed back to the boat. We were on a rising tide, but we still didn't want the boats to move any further inshore into the sand.
Engines on, and still rafted together, I quickly felt that the rudder was into solidly into sand. Initially, Ramble On was the inshore boat, and clearly aground, so I put it into gear and started to try to push both boats out toward deeper water. We got some motion going while Bob was pulling up anchor.
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| How we would have rather spent our afternoon! |
We managed to unraft, and get free, but Finnish Line was still stuck as they brought up their anchor. We were circling a short distance away when we realized this. I hopped into the dinghy with a longer tow line to help out if I could while Linda continued to circle. When I got to Finnish Line, Bob was hard on the throttle. I came along the inshore side and, like a tug, pushed sideways towards deeper water. Finnish began moving and quickly Finnish Line was free.
That's wasn't quite the end of it as "Close Finnish" (Bob's dinghy) was attached to the davits but still in the water and was being dragged sideways as he motored toward deeper water. The dinghy quickly flipped over (no motor attached, whew). Bob quickly flipped it back upright and sorted everything out with no loss of equipment. After taking a deep breath we decided to motor on to l'Anse-Saint-Jean, barely 2 hours away, where we had been a few nights before, and get a slip at a secure and protected floating dock!!!
We arrived just in time to admire the rose-coloured sunset, with no damage done except for perhaps our egos!
Tomorrow ... Tadoussac ...
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| How we all felt at times today |
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