July 7 :  Up the Saguenay

     We spent a leisurely morning at Ile St. Louis, partly because we had no agenda, and partly because Dan as up a few times in the night adjusting the anchor line to make the depth sounder happy.  (It doesn’t like it when we are only in six feet of water, but we draw 3 1/2, so we were good.)  We saw our first seal since Maine - a harbor seal - who seemed as interested in us as we were in him.

      We continued up the fjord, taking in the beautiful sights.  It’s hard to describe the scale of everything here - sailboats and motor boats cruising along the shore are just dots against the cliff.  Interesting geology here - the fjord was created by the crust slipping between two faults, and the cliffs were either carved in round mounds or left standing in steep, sharp prominences by glaciers.  We pulled into Baie Eternite around three pm.

      Our research told us there were moorings here, courtesy of the Saguenay Marine Park, and we’d read there were anywhere from four to eighteen moorings, and some blogs mentioned that most of the moorings were marked as weak or unusable in French.  We see three here today, and we are lucky enough to have one of them, courtesy of a group of sea scouts (or something similar) whose three boats decided to raft together at the park dock instead of on the mooring that they offered to us.  We took the dinghy ashore to embark on the hike to the top of Cap Eternity adjacent to our mooring.

      Well I think I have developed pretty good muscles in my arms and back from raising sail and hauling anchor, but hiking requires better muscles than my sea legs have.  This was a steep, rigorous 4+ mile hike first up to the summit for a spectacular lookout and then down a little to where the statue of the Virgin Mary was erected to protect the mariners who travel the river. 

The trail was well laid out, and well worth the effort.  The promised rainstorm held off until we got back to the boat - are we lucky or what?  Dan made us rice burgers from the leftovers of the other night, as we plan to spend a quiet night here on our mooring in this protected bay.