Beyond the end of the road on the North Shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence are several communities linked by a supply boat—a perfect recipe for sea kayaking adventure.

Story & Photos by Max Finkelstein

A quick look at a Quebec road map shows the highway along the North Shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence ends at a town called Natashquan. There are several communities along the coast between Natashquan and the Labrador border—with alluring names like Blanc Sablon, St. Augustine, Tete-à-la-baleine, La Tabatière, Mutton Bay.

A supply boat, the Nordik Express, runs up the coast once a week in the summer, stopping at every community. A quick phone call confirms that they will take our kayaks on board. A quick trip to the map store and we’re all set to go.

My friend Steve Duffield and I plan to take the Nordik Express from the end of the highway at the community of Natashquan to the town of St. Augustine, near the Québec-Labrador border, and then paddle back. We’ll end the trip when we feel like stopping, and catch the Nordik Express on its way back up the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Natashquan
Natashquan (pronounced Naw-tash-kwon, each syllable said very quickly and with equal emphasis), at the end of Highway 138, La Route des Baleines, is a picturesque village of golden sand beaches and wooden houses. It is the home of Quebec’s most famous nationalist and folk singer, Gilles Vigneault. We spend hours walking the beaches, munching on wild raspberries, talking to local Acadian French and Innu residents. The people who live here are deeply connected to this place of sea, sand and spruce, and proud of their heritage. There is a museum dedicated to Gilles Vigneault (who still lives here!), restored buildings from the cod fishery, and you can even sleep in a traditional Innu camp and feast upon smoked salmon from the Natashquan River and freshly baked bannock.

The joie de vivre of the community is fully expressed in the Café de l’Échourie, where we watch a play based on the characters found in the songs of Gilles Vigneault while chowing down on great local food. On other evenings at l’Échourie, you can take in a movie about the history of the region or a local musician.

Aboard the Nordik Express
At 6 a.m. on the day the Nordik arrives, the dock in Natashquan is crowded with a group of hard-core birders, one cyclist, and about 200 Innu people returning to their homes in the community of Unamen Shipu.

The trip to St. Augustine will take 36 hours, so we have plenty of time to get acquainted with the other passengers and to sample the fare from the galley—“scrumpilicious” meals with a distinctly local flavour. The halibut with white wine sauce, followed by molasses cake for dessert, stands out as one of the best meals I have ever had.

We meet Renaud and Charles, two students from Quebec City on their way to visit with their parents at their cottage on an island near Tete-à-la-Baleine. Renaud marks it on our map with a X and invites us to stop by for a visit.

As darkness falls, those of us who didn’t make arrangements for a cabin, which is almost everyone, stake out their personal real estate in the lounge, stretching out across three or four seats. The big boat rocks gently in the swell, and we fall asleep to the sounds of conversations in French, Innu, and English spoken with a unique “Newfoundlandish” accent.

St. Augustine
The Nordik arrives in St. Augustine (pronounced “saan-a-gooost-in”) at noon the following day. We load up and head not into town, which is six kilometers up a long bay, but west along the coast in a protected channel called Le Petit Rigolet. The channel looks like a big river to us, and with plenty of loons on the water, we Ontarioans feel right at home. But when a seal pops its head up to check us out, we are reminded that this isn’t Lake Superior.

The bugs also make us feel right at home. Our first camp is on a rocky point with just enough room to pitch the tent on a bed of moss and lichen. It’s a full-service campsite, with plenty of rocks for the fireplace and kitchen shelves, driftwood for fuel, ripe cloudberries and, of course, an ocean-full of water for washing up, all within arms reach.

We cook vanilla pudding with cloudberries for dessert—lip-smacking good! Cloudberry, or bakeapple (its name in Newfoundland), has one berry, ranging in colour from mild pastel orange to fiery reddish-orange on each four-inch high plant. Locally they are called Chicoutai, the Innu name, which refers to their brilliant orange colour, found only in cloudberries and campfire flames.

We wake up to a world shrouded in dense fog, pack up quickly and set off. The fog soon lifts, and then sits, like a thick grey blanket, about 100 feet above the ocean, a pattern that repeats itself day after day. The land/seascape is like a combination of the British Columbia coast in miniature and Georgian Bay—islands and rocks, split by miniature fiords with vertical walls up to about 200 feet high.

The tops of the higher islands and ridges on the mainland are bare rock. But most of the land is covered by a luxurious carpet of lichens, mosses and low shrubs—tundra. But not like the tundra of the far north. This tundra has a distinctly maritime flavour. The colour is intense. From our boats, it looks as if someone has poured the greenest of green paint you can imagine from the hilltops. As it poured down the slopes and followed the curves and undulations, it slowly thickened and jelled, like pudding, and separated into its component green shades.

Like stars in the night sky, the fiery orange cloudberries, the crimson red bunchberries, and purple asters punctuate the green-green-green slopes. Burnt-orange patches of Xanthoria lichens colour the bare rock outcrops. Every depression is filled with water, spilling in tiny streams and waterfalls from one to the next. Around each puddle and pond are rich tundra flower beds.

This coastline is not as remote as we expected. We see cozy cabins each day, tucked into sheltered coves on the islands and along the mainland. As we cut across Bay Ha! Ha! (Ha Ha is an old French term for a dead end), we pass several cottages and then see a large freshly painted sign, “Welcome to Williams Harbour Pop.75”. That certainly wasn’t on any of our maps.

We paddle into a long inlet where the community of Bay Ha! Ha! is marked on our map, where a small stream comes into the sea. It’s a beautiful setting, surrounded by high hills. But there is no community here today, just the remains of several cabins that have fallen down. We wash off in a freshwater pool warmed by the sun, finally cleaning off the last of that “night on the supply boat” slime.

La Tabatière
It is only our third day out when we paddle into the first of several communities along the Lower North Shore, La Tabatière, (the name means “sorcerer” in Innu) in the early afternoon. Although the community isn’t linked by road to the rest of the world, it is a modern, thriving town. On the waterfront  we see a stadium-sized metal cube that is the fish processing plant, ten transport truck trailers with containers loaded on them, a cylindrical oil storage tank, about 40 feet tall, a huge barge, the Labmover, loaded with containers, one marked “explosives,” pulled by a big tugboat, and six fishing boats pulled up in dry dock.

We meet Jamie Robertson, great-great-great-grandson of Scottish pioneer Samuel Robertson, who came here in 1820 and established in La Tabatière the most productive seal fishing post in the region. He and his wife have a business selling jam made from cloudberries (he calls them bakeapples, just like in Newfoundland), mountain cranberries, highbush cranberry, and other fruits of the land, to tourists on the Nordik and all over the world through their website (www.bakeapplejam.com).

Mutton Bay
The next community, Mutton Bay, is as pretty as a postcard, nestled in a deep bay, surrounded by big barren hills, framed by smooth rock shores. Graceful wooden rowing skiffs are tied up to floating docks. Weathered wooden storage sheds and wooden homes painted bright yellow and turquoise, capped off by a white church.

We paddle under a causeway and into Portage Bay. We are heading this way to avoid the long trip around Mecatina Point. At the end of the bay, where one would expect the portage to be, we see several small motor boats pulled up on shore, and a wooden boardwalk. There are several homemade carts and wheelbarrows, and a few plastic wagons. Portage jackpot! We load our boats and gear onto carts and head across.

Tête-à-la-baleine
Our next destination is in a maze of islands just off the village of Tête-à-la-baleine, on a skinny island about two kilometres long named Anderson Island. With a strong tailwind out of the north, and the skies lowering, we course the maze of islands and channels, looking for the blue fibreglass sailboat that came to meet the boys when the Nordik docked in Tête-à-la-baleine on our way up here.

The weather is rapidly worsening when we see in the distance the spire of the church on island of Providence, the most seaward island of this archipelago. We realize we’re on the wrong side of Anderson Island and decide to paddle around its seaward tip and circle back. This route exposes us to the full brunt of the wind and waves, and we cautiously navigate outside some scary rock reefs with big breakers crashing in on them. Still no cottage or sailboat, and now we’re really confused. We stop by a derelict home, and climb a small hill. We now see the blue sailboat and white cottage, and realize that we’re one island too far east. Back in our boats, we now find the right channel to the sheltered harbour of Anderson Island. We climb a big hill on the next island, and realize we missed the channel on our circumnavigation by skirting those rock reefs. Easy to get confused out here.

We’re ready for the hot coffee, freshly baked cloudberry scones and home-made pickled herring served up by the parents of Renaud and Charles. They suggest we camp on Île de Providence. At least we already know how to get there.

Île de Providence
As we surf into the harbour at Île de Providence, it looks like a crowd waiting for us. Well, if you can call four adults, ten kids, and one black Labrador retriever a crowd. This is a thriving community of about 20 homes, a dozen fishing sheds and the church. All the buildings are freshly painted and fixed up. People are moving back here to stay. Steve and I are impressed with the wooden fishing boats—graceful, beamy, with upturned bow and stern. I would feel very safe at sea in one of these 18-foot skiffs.

We set up the tent on a patch of grass and I ask one of the fishermen about the, er, “facilities.” He points to an outhouse at the edge of town and says that we can use that if we can “make it work.”

He spoke in French (the first French we have heard so far on this coast) and I wondered if I had misunderstood him. But after we had finished our supper, another lip-smackingly tasty concoction of Kraft dinner and dried veggies, followed by chocolate pudding brulé, we waddle over to the outhouse to check it out. Gosh! It’s a propane-powered outhouse, installed by the Quebec government in a well-intentioned attempt to control pollution. The instructions are unintelligible in either French or English. But it involves flames and sparks and combustion. Steve and I look at each other, and we are both thinking the same thing. Ker-pow! There’s goes Max, with his pants down around his knees, flying over Petit Mecatina Island on his way to Harrington Harbour!

Petit île Mecatina
We decide to head to Petit île Mecatina the standard way—by paddling. We land at the head of a deep bay, by an undercut cliff almost 100 feet high and as long as several football fields. As we carefully clamber up the steep shoreline, we notice shards of ochre-red terra cotta. A newly cut trail leads to a site that has been excavated by archaeologists! Wooden stakes connected by string divided the site into rectangles. In one rectangle there are hundreds of pieces of terra cotta. In another, flat stones of what once must have been the floor of a building have been revealed. We realize we are looking at the site of a Basque whaling station.

Basque whalers first came to the Sea of Whales in the early 1500s. They brought these tiles with them from Europe to the New World in huge quantities as ship ballast on the outward leg of their voyage and for roofing their blubber furnace shed and other workshops on shore.

Archaeological studies by the Smithsonian Institution on this site found cutting tools made from stone from Newfoundland, over 2000 years old. Long before the Basque came here, others stopped at this sheltered harbour, with its overhanging cliff, abundant fresh water, and good fishing for whales.

Steve and I have been puzzled on this trip about the lack of marine wildlife. We’ve seen a few loons and sea ducks, and had our spectacular whale encounter just off the shores of this ancient Basque site, but in general, wildlife has been scarce. When the Basque came here 500 years ago, they dubbed the Gulf of St. Lawrence the Sea of Whales. Where are they now?

Harrington Harbour
We head across the open ocean on a calm misty day to the community of Harrington Harbour, where we have decided to end this portion of our journey. Brightly painted wooden buildings, fishing boats moored in front of wooden storehouses or pulled up in dry dock, clotheslines strung on bicycle wheels mounted on wooden poles, 12-foot wide elevated wooden sidewalks winding away from the water. There are no roads here, and no cars. Four wheelers zoom along the wooden walkways. The place looks like it was built as a movie set. In fact, Harrington Harbour was a used as the setting for the Quebec film La Grande Seduction, a story about trying to attract a doctor to move to a small fishing village, where the fish are all gone and all the men unemployed.

We paddle into the harbour and, like all good sailors home from the sea, seek lodging. Larry, the harbour manager, directs us to Amie’s B&B, a short paddle away. Amie greets us with a smile, spoils us with her wondrous meals (I take home some of her recipes, my favorite being Wind Pudding) and entertains us with her charm and stories of growing up on this island.

Amie is a direct descendent of the first Newfoundland families who settled here in the second half of the 19th century, fishing for cod. It was not an easy life, as a walk through the graveyard attests—so many young men lost at sea (including Amie’s husband), so many women dying in childbirth. Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, founder of the Grenfell Mission, built a hospital on the island in the late 19^th century, earning the village its nickname of Hospital Island. The original hospital burnt down, but a modern new hospital has replaced it, looking quite out of place on this rocky, isolated island. Bobby Orr, the famous defenseman for the Boston Bruins, visited here regularly and donated hockey equipment and coaching tips for the local hockey team. It’s a busy place still today, with a population of 300, mostly fishermen, who have shifted their focus lower down on the food chain than cod. There’s a restaurant, a bar, even a doctor.

The island has a special place in the European history of North America as the site of the first baby born to a European in North America. In 1543, Marguerite de la Roque, niece of French explorer Sieur de Roberval, accompanied her uncle on a voyage to Canada.

Marguerite fell in love aboard ship, and her uncle Roberval, for reasons we can only speculate upon, marooned her, her lover, and her maid. They moved into the cave, and Marguerite’s baby was born. But winter came early, and winter came hard, and by the time winter had left, only Marguerite survived. She continued to survive, miraculously, for two more years. Finally, she managed to flag down a passing English fishing ship and was returned safely to France. She wrote about her adventures, and documents found in France confirm that this was indeed the island where Marguerite was marooned.

Steve and I follow a well-marked trail through the tuckamore to Marguerite’s Cave. It is not really much of a cave. Two blocks of Canadian Shield have collapsed, leaning on each other, leaving a triangular opening about four feet high that tapers like a trawl net as you poke into the depths of the cave. It’s hard to imagine surviving here for two years. The island was no doubt different back then. It was likely forested, and perhaps caribou wandered over on the ice in winter. Perhaps Innu people helped Marguerite survive. The story still resonates today, and has been told and re-told in modern novels and on stage.

We ask Amie if we can take her rowing skiff on a short harbour tour. We slide the skiff into the water, and each take one of the two rowing stations. Each oar is held in place by two wooden pegs. Steve and I are confused, as the boat is dangerously bow-heavy when we are both facing backwards. Amie waves at us from shore and tells me, in the stern position, to turn around and face forward.

“Landlubbers!” we’re sure everyone in town is thinking. We ease into the rhythm of rowing, pass a skiff loaded with four children about the age of my 10-year-old son Isaac, and threaten to board them. There is nothing as fun as messing around in boats! We head out the channel to the open sea, and think about our next destination, the Mingan Islands, “Quebec’s Haida Gwaii.” We wonder how much difference 30 years of national park protection have made. We will see, if we can ever figure out how to turn this boat around!