The Accidental Cruise

At the end of last summer’s Vogue Optical Charlottetown Race Week, Wellington Gay and his friends Percy Simmons and Peter Greenan were hoisting a pint at the clubhouse, lamenting the end of their favourite annual regatta. “We didn’t want it to end,” Gay recalls. “So we came to a decision to sail to the Magdalen Islands. The next day.”

It was a good choice for the Prince Edward Island-based sailors. After all, the Magdalens have been casting their siren call across the Gulf of Saint Lawrence for generations. The archipelago that hangs at the inner end of the Cabot Strait forms a near-perfect equilateral triangle with East Point on Prince Edward Island and the northern tip of Cape Breton Island — an isolated and exotic place, and yet relatively easy to reach for a sailor with a few years of navigation under his belt.

On the Sunday, Gay stocked the galley of his J30 sloop Midnight with food, filled the water tanks and topped up the fuel. The three sailors began motoring out of Hillsborough Bay at 7 a.m. on Monday. “We caught a following tide that took right us out of the bay,” says Gay. The 15-knot wind carried Midnight on a tight reach toward the eastern island around Point Prim to Wood Island with a single reef in the mainsail and the boat’s 150 jib. “We found the auto helm responded best with that rigging.” After a day of brisk winds, they rounded the Fairway buoy at the mouth of Souris Harbour and weighed anchor for the night, exactly 10 hours and five minutes after they left Charlottetown.

The next morning the crew sailed up the north coast of Prince Edward Island to East Point on a 15-knot reach, took a bearing at Entry Island and headed out into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. They were out of site of land for about four-and-a-half hours before they spotted the low rolling hills of the Magdalens on the horizon.

It was a welcome sight. In the days before electronic navigation, the Magdalens were a hazard to be feared— a vast sandtrap waiting for Montreal-bound ships picking their way through Gulf of Saint Lawrence fog banks. Today the shallow island waters are the resting place of hundreds of shipwrecks, and some of the islanders are descendants of the survivors of those wrecks — like human versions of the Sable Island ponies.

The population is predominantly French, but the Magdalens are also home to some of Quebec’s oldest English population — inhabitants who have traditionally eked out a living from the sea and from small subsistence farms. Today the fishery is in a sharp decline, and Magdaleners have turned to another island asset to support themselves — their archipelago’s natural beauty and spectacular beaches that drive a lucrative tourist industry. It’s a colourful place, tinted in layers of green farms, red cliffs and white sand, and speckled with brightly painted houses — a Mecca for windsurfers and kiteboarders, a popular cycling destination with first-class dining, accommodations and infrastructure.

Midnight found a berth in the busy harbour at Cap-aux-Meules, the administrative center of the Magdalens. Cap-aux-Meules, the largest community and epicenter of tourism, shopping and island nightlife — is a place still known to many Anglophones as “Grindstone.”

The Magdalens offers a wealth of cruising opportunities for the small-boat sailor: the well-marked channel at Havre Aubert; the protected fishing harbours of Grand Entrée and Old Harry; the high hills and hiking trails of isolated Ile d’Entrée where you can see the highlands of Cape Breton on a clear day. But Gay and his companions chose to rent a small car to explore the islands instead. “There’s a good highway running down the middle, with water on both sides,” says Gay. “It reminded me a lot of the Florida Keys.”

By day the Midnight crew explored the communities that dotted the connected islands; at night they dined in style downtown in Cap-aux-Meules. On Friday they were joined by a fourth crew member — Donnie Wood — who had parked his car in Souris and arrived in Cap-aux-Meules as a walk-on ferry passenger. On Saturday the expanded crew set sail for home.

“We rounded the point and caught a strong wind off our starboard quarter with a heavy swell,” says Gay. The crew took turns on the helm, each competing to see how fast they could make the boat come off the waves. Their first sight of PEI was the wind turbine on East Point. They dropped off their extra crew member in Souris and checked the weather. “The next couple of days didn’t look like there was going to be much wind,” says Gay. “We were going to have to motor anyway, so we decided to head for home that night.” It was a good call — the night was calm and still, and the Northumberland Strait was bathed in the silver light of a full moon. Each man took a turn at the helm while the other two slept below. “It was a beautiful night, and a great way to end the trip,” says Gay. “It’s one we’ll remember for a long time.”

For more information on the Magdalen Islands check out www.tourismeilesdelamadeleine.com