Rob-n-Hild, Eastward Ho!

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Blanc Sablon-Port Hope Simpson 218 km. 2:57 hours. Elevation maximum 320 metres)

When we left you yesterday, we were still at sea and feeeling pretty rough after nothing more than a few hours dozing between stops. We finally got some sleep after leaving St Augustine (the penultimate stop) as there would be 7 or 8 hours to go before Blanc Sablon. At about 3.55 am, Hild was woken by some shuddering to see this outside the window! The tiny bits of ice we saw previously had suddenly become a packed mass of - well let's face it - icebergs! Bella was ploughing through so we ran up on deck to get some better pictures.

After ploughing through a couple of patches of packed ice, we got into Blanc Sablon harbour and had to do some smart manoevering to get a clear space up against the quay. Bella has some serious steerage capability and it was put on show moving sideways, forwards and backwards to push big lumps of ice out of the way.

Final sailing numbers: We left Kegashka at 3 pm on Thursday (about 21 hours late). We sailed over 360 km and arrived at Blanc Sablon at 6 am (23 hours late.

We finally docked around 6 am and then we got excited watching Mary Jane getting lifted off and then driven out of her container. All did not go according to plan, however, as the loading people had managed to misplace the key we left with them and we had to give them our (only) other copy to drive her out. We are now down to one MJ key for the rest of the trip (unless they find it and get it back to us somehow) which leaves us feeling a bit nervous...

But, we couldn't hang around here - we had to get to Labrador and finally leave Quebec behind, if only for a few weeks until we return through the southern part. In almost no time after leaving Blanc Sablon we saw the Newfoundland and Labrador sign and reached the second province on our trip. We drove past the whaling towns on the southern coast (as we will be driving back here in a couple of days) and carried on to Port Hope Simpson to out hotel. Carol very kindly let us check in at 11 or so (given that we should have been here yesterday anyway) and we had a bite of lunch before some exploring was required.

And explore we did! We asked for some help to find a hiking trail that had been described as starting "at the back of the gas station", we asked someone inside for help. The directions were, "Behind some pallets you can see a gap in the trees, and then there are some walking sticks." Well, despite that sounding somewhat weird, it was exactly what we found!

Once on the trail, we hit the kind of conditions we found last year - Gimli snow! However, this year we were prepared and had brought snowshoes with us! Ha, if not quite Legolas, we were now not to be stopped by a snowdrift in our path, Ha! What did stop us was the fact that we had had to go back to the car to get the snowshoes and then walk back up the track and struggle learn how to use them. So we didn't actualy walk very far in the end, just about 7k, but with about 400 meters of climbing in that - and the snow as well - we figured we had deserved out dinner. Which was a Pizza, in case you were wondering.

Coming up: Some exploring in central Labrador

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