Fourteen years

I was cycling home along MacKay Street this afternoon and, as I passed the house we used to rent when we first moved here from Wales in the autumn of 1995, suddenly realised that we have now been in Ottawa for fourteen years. When we moved in, that week, the street looked like it does now, magnificent, though the two maple trees in the foreground on the left were then not much higher than the For Sale sign is now.

The end of the holiday

9th September, 10th September? That was a long time ago, but I still want to conclude my account of Summer 2009 and record of our last evening at Ste. Flavie and the flight home.

The sun went down five minutes before we were due to take our seats in the restaurant at the Auberge and when we went in, we were given the coveted corner table by two windows overlooking the beach and the sculptures. The colours, as you can see from my pictures, were mesmeric. I can't remember now what I ate, surrounded by the Gagnon family's works of art, but I know it tasted good, as did the Quebec wine.

The next morning, having packed reluctantly and breakfasted deliciously, we refuelled the car in Mt Joli, returned it to the airport and climbed back into PTN to take her home. On the way to Quebec airport we overflew the towns we'd driven through the day before, me saying, "There's the church of Ste. Luce, remember?... There's the lighthouse, there's the submarine! Look, you can see the catamaran from Forrestville just pulling into dock..." (and we'd never realised at ground level how close the Rimouski airport had been to the port). The whole of Rimouski was clearly laid out below us, obviously the region's metropolis, a much bigger place than Mt. Joli.

Beyond Rivière du Loup, the landscape became increasingly familiar and I deliberately looked out for the stripe-patterned fields around the mouth of R. Quelle and the curves of the Ile aux Grues, just as I do when I'm 30000ft higher, flying back to Ottawa from the UK.

At Quebec airport, which had had a facelift and looked smart, we discovered that daily flights go from there to Paris. Our destination was not Paris but home, and back to work.

We've been working hard ever since, and I haven't had the time to blog.

The Empress under the sea

After the submarine, the wreck. There's a museum across the road from the Pointe au Père lighthouse that commemorates a ship that rivaled the Titanic, both in its grandeur and in its demise. This was the Empress of Ireland, accidentally rammed and holed by a Norwegian coal freighter in the fog one night off Rimouski, in 1914. She sank in fourteen minutes, with the result that over a thousand lives were lost. It's a sobering story that neither Chris nor I had heard before. In the Pavillon, we saw both the 3-D recreatation on screen as well the exhibition that goes into some detail about this tragedy.

Nowadays the wreck, still down there, is an attraction for scuba divers, an party of whom we later saw setting off in a dinghy from the Rimouski port, all excited and taking photos of one another. It seems that nothing remains tragic for ever.

In the afternoon, after lunch at Les Halles in downtown Rimouski near the Institut maritime du Québec, we drove back in an easterly direction so that I could be soothed by the peaceful atmosphere of the Jardins de Métis, famous for its blue poppies (only in July however); this place is otherwise known as the Reford Gardens. Chris didn't feel like spending $16 just to go and look at some plants growing, but I did, saw some interesting artistic structures in there too, and didn't regret it at all. We met again at the gate an hour later.

Submarine

This time last week we were inside a submarine. The Onondaga , built in Britain in 1967, never took part in any battle, but was deployed for reconnaissance in the cold war against the Soviets. Decommissioned in 2000, she was towed to Rimouski's Site historique maritime de la Pointe-au-Père from Halifax last year and has only been accessible to the public since May this year. She is 90 metres long, weighs 1600 tons and had a crew of 70 men. As I put in my notes, their quarters were "a bit cramped".

From the outside she looks like a monstrous artificial whale. We stood outside looking up at her fin or conning tower with its appendages—the periscope, radar, reception, snorkel induction, communications aerial and snorkel exhaust—listening to the recorded commentary on our audioguides which invited us to board the vessel in the "after ends" (at the back). "When you step aboard, you never know when you'll be disembarking," said the guide, a supposed former sonar operator.

Here's where you'd store your beer, he said, when the hatch wasn't being used for loading. You weren't allowed any beer during the 6 hours before your watch. A series of watertight doors divided the compartments of the sub, with sealed outlets overhead for emergencies. The signal ejector, for instance, could send up coloured smoke flares, red for danger, fire or flood. There's a horrendously small Evacuation Tube through which you'd have to swim in your bright orange survival suit, if it came to that. Before evacuation, the compartment would be flooded. Imagine.

Then we squeezed into the engine compartment. Underwater the sub moved at a cautious 4 knots on a quiet, electric motor. The batteries would last for three days at this rate, but if you had to speed up to 13 knots they'd only last half an hour. On the surface the diesel engines were used. The guide mentioned that the smell of the fuel and of the men was all pervasive in this unventilated narrow tube, but you got used to it. They started with 38,000 litres of diesel in the tanks that would be gradually replaced with sea water as it was used up. The men who worked in the engine room would have to work in 60° of heat, too, and wear ear-muffs. Beneath the engines lay the snake pit (trou de serpent) that you could reach down a ladder.

You were never permitted more than a 20second shower, as water on board was at a premium, and to encourage natural "biorhythms" you lived under red light bulbs during the night, in white light during the daytime.

We inspected the instrument panels, many of which looked very modern, the sonar screens on a "glass cockpit". They played us the sounds that a sonar engineer would analyse and often immediately be able to recognise. Each kind of sea traffic had its own acoustic signature, trawlers, cargo ships; even shoals of fish make a distinctive noise on the sonar receiver.

The Sick Bay consisted of two wall mounted cupboards near a trio of bunk beds where the only privacy you get is by pulling your curtains across. To keep up the crew's morale the ship employed first class cooks who baked their own daily bread. There was no room for everyone to sit down in a canteen so crew members would tend to carry their meals away from the galley to eat them in their bunks. How they did this in the limited space available I'm not sure. All waste was expelled from the sub. through a Garbage Ejector.

The front of the ship was the business end from which they'd have launched the torpedoes, 16 of them available. On the Onondaga they had a 6km range and would move at 100kph. This was the coolest, best ventilated compartment of the vessel so it was sometimes used as a movie theatre. For blue movies, so they hinted, but "what happens on board stays on board."

Submariners are apparently proud of "their dolphins" (the badges they wear when qualified), but the service has never earned high prestige; it's sometimes called the "silent service" because of its secret habits and (literally!) low profile. At least they have no dress code to worry about. The training lasts eight months and their evacuation procedures are taught at Rimouski. They also have to learn how to operate the valves on board blind, in case the lights go out. When they pass their exams the new submariners are thrown into the water, and it's cold.

Rather them than me.

The beauty of the island

I'll come back to my chronicle shortly; for the moment I'd like to insert some visual memories of Grand Manan. I didn't record the swish of the water against the yacht's prow, the waves breaking over the pebbly beach, the clink of the metal rings on the masts, the wind flapping lines of washing or flags, the horn of the ferry arriving and departing. You'll just have to imagine those, the smell of the seaweed and the steaming bowls of seafood chowder, too. It was an unpretentious, genuine place, not stage managed for tourists. I hope it will stay that way. Now that visitors from the USA have been largely deterred from going there because of stricter border controls and the recession, it may well. It's still a wild island away from the eastern shore; in fact when our friends were preparing their planes for takeoff on Monday they saw a cougar chasing a deer down the runway.

Anyway, here are the pictures:

Grand Manan to Ste Flavie

Written in a notebook on Tuesday evening, when we couldn't get the Internet connection to work.

We'd booked a room at Marcel Gagnon's Centre d'Art and Auberge here in Ste. Flavie weeks ago so were obliged to arrive today. It's another place with a sea view from the bedrooms, this time including the artist's Grand Rassemblement of concrete figures wandering up onto shore or being submerged in the waves.

There's amazing clarity in the air here as well. We flew through a "mild cold front", hardly noticeable but for a few bumpy clouds and a clearing of the haze that lay over the New Brunswick coast when we took off across the island of Grand Manan to the north, with one last glimpse of the Swallowtail light, fishing weirs and cliffs. We crossed the open water parallel to the route taken by our friends in the ferry on Sunday, with a view of The Wolves, small islands in the Grand Manan channel. Even hazier views inland though we could make out the military practice area south of Gagetown and as we approached our destination we passed a series of ponds in the muskeg magically full of cloud reflections that made for some good photos (appearing here soon). Joining left base in the circuit for "Freddie" (Fredericton) we saw the elegant bridge over the St John River, and then we were down for a late breakfast in the terminal building. 70 nautical miles.

The second leg of our journey was 180 nautical miles, east of the St John River on a line almost directly north (i.e. magnetic north) from Fredericton to Mont Joli. This route took us over some very wild country where the only sign of human interference was a maze of loggers' tracks in the hilly forests. There wasn't much on the map either though I identified the Tobique River, the Kedgewick River and the Restigauche in the valleys in the vicinity of the Quebec / New Brunswick border. We could hear other pilots coming into Charlo on the Baie des Chaleurs, but I never spotted the bay for the hills that were now covered with dark blobs of shadow as the clouds thinned out. They finally disappeared as the St Laurence estuary came in sight with the sunny rolling countryside--fields of barley-- on its south bank. That's where we were headed.

While Chris was tying PTN down and having her refuelled I went into the Mont Joli terminal and rented a car for our two days at the "Gateway to the Gaspésie". We drove to our lodging then back up the hill to retrieve the SPOT device that Chris suddenly remembered leaving on PTN's nose, and so on up the road a couple of kilometres into Mont Joli which is liberally decorated with frescoes depicting past times, called Les Murmures de la Ville. I like that name. We had a snack at the railway hotel restaurant, rather a grand place considering that the Montreal-Gaspé train only stops here twice daily, both times in the middle of the night.

During the rest of the afternoon I drove us to the edge of Rimouski, discovering the Pointe-au-Père Historic Site where were three tourist attractions, the 2nd tallest lighthouse in Canada, a museum about the wreck of the Empress of Ireland (a Titanic like disaster) and a naval submarine... these to be described in the next blog because we visited them on the morrow.

We watched the sun go down behind the distant shore, at which Chris made hissing noises, then ate an excellent supper at a window table, where we could gaze at the afterglow.

On the island of Grand Manan

We spent Monday neither in the air nor on the water but on land, walking down the steep wooden steps and across the wooden bridge over a rocky chasm to the Swallowtail Light on the headland where we sat a while contemplating the sea. The curious circular or heart shaped fences in the sea are traps for herring, fishing weirs, so we learned in the afternoon after hiring a couple of bikes and having peddled against the wind along the coast road as far as the museum at Grand Harbour. The island's school was across the road, the original one being a simple shed (plus outhouse) now in the museum's back garden.

The museum showed a bit of everything, some of the exhibits put together by pupils at the school: the history of local fishing, the spoils from wrecked ships, a huge lighthouse light filling the stairway, a display of picture-rugs, a room full of stuffed birds, a model of the "slotted wave guide"(a piece of radar equipment) that a worthy islander (Ernest Guptill) had invented, as well as various model boats and everyday artefacts from the past.

While cycling back to our motel, the wind pleasurably behind us now, we paused at the salt marshes and fisheries, the sea a glorious deep blue.

The rest of our gang had departed at mid-day after we'd all lingered over breakfast at the Compass Rose in a room with another sea view. Left to our own devices that evening, Chris and I dined at Sailors Landing in North Head as on the first night, watching their slide show of photos, and before our weary legs gave way we took one last look at the Swallowtail light house from the north side of the village, walking down by the shore under the stars, then slept like logs for at least the next ten hours, with the sound of the waves in our ears.