What's with the Northumberland Strait?

Sailing the Northumberland Strait was a unique experience for us.  I had not expected to encounter anything in particular here other than the hope for warmer waters near PEI.  But I was pleasantly surprised by the mood or maybe an enlightening that the Strait seemed to bring forth as we travelled through it.  I am not sure what was going on but we were perhaps becoming much more at ease with being at sea than either of us expected we would be.  Perhaps we were gradually flowing into this ease in the same fashion that we had flowed out into the Atlantic waters from the St. Lawrence River.

Often, while we were both cozily and safely seated in our office in our home in Waterville, many months before, watching the snow quietly fall around us peering out over the fields in front of us, dreaming and excitedly planning this voyage, I became familiar with a reoccurring uneasy apprehensiveness that seemed to overcome me each time I thought about our entry into the Atlantic on board our little ship. We referred to it as the spilling out from the St. Lawrence River.  It was this point of the voyage that kept returning to me as the true unknown, always percolating there at the back of my mind.  It was not a nervous or fearful sensation but its unsettled boil, much like the waters of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River can be, was a force that I knew I was going to have to personally reckon with.  And I cannot say when it happened but that sense of unrest seemed to calmly slip away from me as we sailed forward without me even noticing it.  As I look back upon it now, I am sure the gradual progression we made toward the sea paralleled the gradual release of my anxiety around it.  Perhaps it was the imminent understanding of the conditions around us that came with the currents in the river as far back as flowing through the channels of the Thousand Islands. Or maybe the effects on us of the rapid and exciting waters through Quebec City, where we photo recorded our chart plotter at a speed of 11.5 knots wondering if we would ever see those speeds again.  

It could have been as we automatically readjusted ourselves and our vessel to the introduction of the tidal impacts at Trois-Rivieres.  Perhaps the visual imaging mapping into my brain of the daily onset of the widening of the river as we sailed along it crept into me so much so that I was imprinted with an ever increasing sense of confidence.  I wonder if my uneasiness had been so overshadowed by the power and beauty of my surroundings and my place within it that it was easily overtaken.  Maybe it was a combination of it all;  and although I do not know when it happened, I do know that I was almost shocked by my reaction at the result.  For as we sailed out of the St. Lawrence River into to the Gulf and in to the Northumberland Strait, the Atlantic waters, the ease of entry became far more a natural flow than the spill that I had so previously envisioned.    

We will remember the waters of the Northumberland Strait with the flamboyance of color. We noticed that these waters presented such vibrance and brilliance and truth of color.  Probably because color was so apparent and visually forced upon us by the utter number of the brightly painted buoys attached to lobster traps set in the strait ranging from one end of the spectrum to the other.  Upon entering the strait we were so taken by the abundance of buoys identifying lobster traps that we saw nothing else.  We had been warned that there were 4 licenses for 4 lobster fishermen for the month of August for the northern portion of the Strait so we expected to see traps. However, we were not aware of how many vessels each licence actually covered and how many traps that would actually mean.  So when we were inundated with miles and miles and miles and miles of the buoys marking the fishing grounds we were quite shocked.  We tried to sail offshore but the fishing grounds stretched almost across the entire strait  to the coast of PEI so that did not help, we tried to sail close to shore but due to the long beaches  and  shallow waters of the strait that was impossible too so we were left with picking our way through them. The buoyed grounds stretched all the way from Shediac, NB to the Confederation Bridge and it was quite a learning experience to actually watch the activities of the lobster boats as they weaseled their way through their traps to monitor them.  All the while, we were on our own active and extremely tedious and difficult watch so as not to become tangled in the lines of the buoys as we attempted to travel forward. The process was so disconcerting that we could not even take notice the beauty of the waters around us until far beyond our passing of the Bridge and until the relaxed point of the sail had returned.  We actually started to notice the water as we sailed deeper and deeper toward the centre of the strait where the waters settled and the buoys diminished as did our need for close attention to that matter.  The photos of the water colors that I have taken do not come close to the depiction of my memory of the brilliance of what I was seeing.  I seemed to be mesmerized as I watched them change and reappear in different hues as we skimmed the water.   Perhaps I was being hypnotized by the ever movement of the waters but my recollection of those pure colors will not fade easily from me.  

And here we were about to depart these waters of the Northumberland Strait.  But travelling the length of this whole body of water is another amazing journey in itself.  On such a long voyage as the Down East Route through the Canadian waterways,  one covers so many different watercourses that it is difficult to put out favorites but traversing the Northumberland Strait offered us such a unique sailing experience that we choose not to reflect upon it lightly.  We were sailing with Dawson, our grandson, on board,  a treat in itself.  But we were also positioned in a place in the world, out in the centre of the Northumberland Strait in beautiful clear waters and weather where the three of us might never experience the phenomenon again.  I do not know of any other place where one can stand up on planet Earth, feel the warm sun and wind in your face, spin 360 degrees and physically be surrounded by and view 3 of our country’s provinces at the same time.  Shortly after we sailed Bridlewilde under the Confederation Bridge that joins the provinces of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island at the Northumberland Strait, the coastlines of all three Maritime Provinces were clearly visible to us.  The sensation that we were engulfed by them was pretty cool to all three of us and we all sported a loud and healthy cheer out over the water.  The captain and I smiled at each other knowing that whatever this was it felt safe, it felt like home and it felt good.