Crossing the channel

We chose to stay on the island for a third day and a night, renting bikes again and doing a demi-tour de l'Isle after a hike on the beach. We walked around the pointe du bout d'en bas at the eastern tip of the island where there's a statue of the Virgin Mary

Notre Dame, Étoile de la Mer, protège nos navigateurs! Sois le Bon Secours de nos débardeurs! ...

and stopped for a club sandwich up the hill on the terrasse of the Hotel Cap-aux-Pierres with its view of the south shore. We played a round of mini-golf too, with only two points between us at the finish. (He won, though.) The holes had witty names: Le Trou Caché, Le Hasard, Le Pointu, Le Détour, Le Bosselé, Le Monticule, etc. On the last one, near impossible, La Montée, the balls kept rolling back down. Our demi-tour took us across the middle of the island, the Chemin de la Traverse, not a very long road through what appeared to be fields of dark brown peat and a hilly forest.

We woke next morning to thick mist and the sound of a fog horn. It looked as though our departure would be delayed and it was, till after 11 o'clock, after two calls to Charlevoix airport to confirm that the visibility was gradually improving. Here are views of the turf / gravel runway at Isle aux Coudres from the threshold of 35, and a view down through the mist of the same airport once we had taken off. Chris would want me to go into some detail at this point, concerning his quarter-of-an-hour IFR flight from Ile aux Coudres (CTA3) to Charlevoix (CYML), landing after an NDB approach and an overshoot (having approached too high across the intervening hills!) onto Runway 15. He says it was probably the most unusual IFR flight he's ever done.

Anyway, Our Lady of the air and outer space had mercy upon us and we landed safely to see her in effigy, stuck to an interior wall in the posh terminal. Shortly after our landing a small plane full of grey haired golfers touched down, arriving from Montmagny on the south shore of the St. Lawrence. I expect they were going to stay at the nearby Fairmont Manoir Richelieu, whereas we called the gîte I fancied (having visited its website previously), La Luciole. The airport man also gave me the number of a car rental fellow in La Malbaie, who drove up to the airport with a car for us. We had a bit of communication problem because he didn't speak so clearly in his Quebec French and my French isn't exactly Quebec French in any case, but it worked out fine. La Luciole, in Ste-Irénée, did indeed turn out to be a lovely place to stay, but I'll write a separate blogpost about that.