10 July, 2015  Ile du Bec to Matane
   
      The phrase, "If you build it they will come" came to mind about the bird sanctuary.  But the birding was nothing special from our perspective.  This is a part of the coast where you really can't get close to shore except in rare cases as in harbors only.  The rest of the shore seems to be a boney, rocky, mess.  And the harbors are few and far between,  and almost all man-made at that.

   
      We had chosen to skip Rimouski, so our destination , Matane, was 60 miles to the North East.  With luck it was almost flat calm and having turned to the dark side, being primarily a motor-boat, we were pretty happy.  Most of the day we had very little current so we powered along at about 6.5 knots, and viewed the coast from a couple miles off.  As usual each town has a dominant church, and maybe some kind of industry,  but but no harbor.

      Now Matane for whatever reason has two harbors, one yacht and one commercial.  We made Matane at about 5 PM and chose to use the commercial harbor and were chased in by the big Matane to Baie Comeau ferry.

     They really come into harbor meaning business.  We were advised to either anchor or tie to a fishing boat,  but as there was a whole 200 foot floating dock empty but for one fisherman, we tied up there.  Kathy asked a guy in an old ford pick-truck if it was okay to overnite there, and whatever he said, she took as a yes.

      We took a little walk up the busy main 4 lane road and returned along the frontage road along the water.   We had a quiet nite if you can call being serenaded by 300 gulls quiet.