Gaspe, Quebec

Behind us at the dock in Havre Aubert was a friendly sailor from Montreal. His name, he told us, was Luc, Lucky Luc. He laughed a lot, and when he did,his face broke open into a big horsey smile. Lucky Luc was the spitting image of the actor Gary Busey.

"You're taking this boat all the way back to Ottawa?" he asked one afternoon, as we were chatting at dockside. "How are you going to do that? Are you going via Kingston and the Rideau Canal?"

"No," Herbert answered, "we're going straight up the Ottawa River, the sameway we came down."

"I don't think so," Lucky Luc said, "there's not enough water. For the past three years the water levels have been very low. I've tried three times to get to the lock at Ste Anne de Bellevue, but I got stuck each time. And my draft is only five feet. What's yours?"

"Six foot four," answered Herbert nervously, chewing on his lower lip.

"Well I don't think you'll make it to the lock. The water in the lake there is so low that in some marinas the boats have to be dragged out on their sides. Some boats are stuck inside altogether."

Now both our brows were furrowing in alarm. Not enough water to get back to Ottawa? Northern Magic unable to make it back home? It couldn't be true. Our hearts were set on bringing Northern Magic back to her old spot at Petrie Island, right where our grand adventure had started.

We began pouring over our charts. Four years ago, we had fretted about negotiating the shallow lake where the Ottawa River joins the St. Lawrence at Montreal. The navigable channel was extremely narrow, and we had been so close to bottom that our propeller had actually gotten stuck in seaweed. If, as Lucky Luc had told us, the water levels were now even lower, we might really have a problem. Making our triumphant return to Ottawa in a U-Haul truck wasn't really what we'd been imagining.

An hour later we hauled Lucky Luc away from his dinner table to show us on the chart exactly where the problem was. To our relief, he had never tried using the narrow channel we were planning to take. Still, if water levels were down, it was going to be tight.

"I have a great idea!" e-mailed Dad, whose ideas in this regard must be taken seriously, because he's an engineer. "You must eat all those old cans of beans etc. etc. under the floor boards; unload the giraffe and hundreds of masks and weapons too numerous to list, 812 movies, 1247 CD-roms and 199 charts and sailing guides. Then you get 22 large tractor tire tubes, inflate them with helium (be sure not to eat the helium and turn into the girls choir of Westminster) and attach them to each other with ropes laterally across the boat so that they stay below the water line. Then everybody except Chris get off the boat with the motor running and portage to the locks while Chris drives the boat through the high spot!!! And thus the promised arrival is saved and thousands will rejoice!"

Our discussion with Lucky Luc made us realize it was time to plan the rest of our journey. We began studying our notes, books and charts, and realized despite having a month ahead of us, it would actually be hard work making it back to Ottawa by the end of August.

Confined to a river, and heading upstream, we'll no longer be able to count on making 120 or 140 miles a day sailing around the clock. In the early stretches of the St. Lawrence we can sail overnight, but as the river narrows upstream, it will become harder and harder to do. Everything will have to be timed around the tides. While the tides are rising, they will counteract the current and we'll be able to sail with them. But when the tides are falling, they will add to the current and in some places produce five or six knots of flow against us.

Herbert got out the tide tables and began calculating that in some places, we'll have to get going by 5:00 a.m., take a rest in the afternoon during ebb tide, and then start again at suppertime. We conservatively figured that after Rimouski we couldn't count on making much more than 40 miles (70 kilometres) a day. I kept on thinking of the several people who'd e-mailed us in Nova Scotia, saying reassuringly that we were now only a week's easy motoring away from Ottawa. Well, it wasn't going to be so simple.

But the wind was howling, discouraging us from leaving. Every day, at least 20 and 25 knots, often more, rushed through and created whitecaps and lines of foamy white water inside the well protected little harbour. As unsailorly as this may be to confess, I am sick of the wind. It had forced us back on our first attempt at crossing the North Atlantic, it had howled against us for ten days in Flores, and it had battered us during our final big passage. I'd had enough wind to last me a lifetime.

The wind was rushing pell-mell into a huge low stationed over Labrador. Day after day it continued, and although it was from the southwest, a good direction, it was stronger than we - or especially I - would have liked. That last passage still so fresh in my memory, I had no trouble vividly imagining how the waves created by 25 knots of wind would feel. I just didn't want to leave our little oasis of peace.

Herbert, however, was eager to go. "Once that low moves away," he was predicting, "the wind will just have to shift to the northwest, and then it will really be misery. Would you rather be beating into 25 knots? Now that would be really terrible. I think we need to leave now. If we don't, we'll be stuck here a week."

I eyed those whitecaps, the baby brothers of the two-metre waves that I knew were waiting to pounce on us outside the harbour. I imagined the wind pummelling inside my ears and the spray lashing my face and the way my stomach would soon be churning. I wanted peace. I wanted calm. I wanted no waves.

My lower lip trembling, I whimpered: "I don't want to go!"

Together we listened to the weather forecast. I clenched my teeth, glowered and looked meaningfully at Herbert as the announcer talked about a gale warning just south of us, small craft advisories everywhere, and strong winds for the next several days. There was no let-up in sight. But when we heard a prediction that in two days the winds would shift to northwest, I was forced to reconsider my opposition. If we didn't set off immediately, we'd be in for a really rough ride, or we'd waste even more precious days waiting it out. Herbert was right. I hate it when he's right.

In order to get around the island and on our northwesterly course, we'd have to go through a narrow channel and, for about 16 miles, on a course that would put us almost directly into the wind. Just getting around the island was going to be a drama. My innards lurched in sheer anticipation. They knew only too well what that beating into the wind is like. We'd been doing almost nothing but beating for the past ten months, since the bottom of the Red Sea. While crossing the Atlantic, I'd negotiated a pact with my stomach in which I had promised that once we arrived in Canada, it wouldn't have to put up with any more windward sailing. If I broke my promise, my gut was going to make me pay dearly. It was already sending me unmistakeable threats.

"Let's wait until this afternoon to leave," suggested Herbert, whose ample and generally cooperative stomach wasn't sending him any alarming messages at all. "The wind always calms down in the afternoon, so maybe we can leave around suppertime and make it though the pass then. We'll have a few bad hours until we're around the island, but it will be good sailing after that."

"Easy for you to say," I muttered. "But you can't fool me. I know exactly what those waves are going to feel like."

We did manage to leave during a temporary dampening of the wind. On the way out, among the diving terns, gannets and seagulls, we spotted a puffin flying low and awkwardly just over the water. Its wings were seemingly too small for its chubby black body, apparently not strong enough to carry that chunky orange parrot-like beak. I'd become fascinated by puffins after learning that they spend their winters at sea, over the frigid and stormy North Atlantic. You have to admire that plucky little bird.

I went to have a nap as we headed into the waves, but found it impossible to sleep. Even once on our correct course, with the wind on the beam, we were lurching sharply from side to side. Unlatched drawers were flinging themselves open, and anything accidentally left unsecured was sliding around the cabin floor. My stomach had transformed itself into a raised fist, pressing into my abdomen and shouting, "I shall make you pay for what you have done!"

On my night watch, as I struggled, spread-eagled, to wrestle my rampaging underwear drawer back into place, I felt the need to shake Herbert awake. "You see?" I wanted to say, "This is why I didn't want to leave!"

The passage took 24 hours. On the VHF radio weather report the next afternoon, we heard that the winds were rising to gale force by morning. This didn't matter to us anymore, because we were heading into the calm of Gaspe Bay, watching in amazement as 50 or 60 feet of glistening whale, the colour and size of a wet asphalt driveway, surfaced right beside us. The whale emitted an explosive exhalation that made Herbert and me jump in surprise and just about accidentally join it in the water.

Within a couple of hours, we were snugly docked in the town of Gaspe. That night the wind continued to increase and howl in our rigging, making our halyards slap and dance noisily against our masts. Next morning, the entire Gulf of St. Lawrence, from the Cabot Strait to Anticosti Island, was battered by gale force winds of 35 and 40 knots, all from the northwest.

Herbert just kept looking smugly at me. He didn't say much, but "I told you so," was written all over his grinning face.

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