 | CANADA |
| CANADA |
PORT CARTIER
Back on Highway 138, our Route des Baleines I've just driven past someone's house with a sign hanging from it - the Chemin du Roy. That's rather wishful thinking.
I've just driven past the 50th parallel now, and so you will be pleased to learn that we are now level with Land's End in the UK, Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany and Prague in the Czech Republic.
We're also level with the major industrial town of Port Cartier, which you can see in the distance across the bay over there.
And it will not have escaped your attention that we are now seeing more and more evergreen trees and fewer and fewer deciduous trees. There's a change in climatic zone in the offing, isn't there?
Port-Cartier owes its existence to three factors
Over there in the background in the above photo you can see a steel mill that takes advantage of all three of them.
Port-Cartier also had an installation of the Quebec and North Shore Paper Company, which we encountered at Baie Comeau
In the foreground of the above photo and clearly displayed in this photo we have what looks like the remains of an arboriduc, one of which we encountered at Forestville
But what's that out there in the distance behind the arboriduc?
Here's another view, from the reverse angle, of what I think might be our arboriduc. You can see that it leads down to what looks as if it might have been some simple kind of quay for loading.
You can also see something else for which Port-Cartier is quite famous - its sandy beaches. The whole of the North Shore is said to have over 200kms of sandy beach, some of which are said to be amongst the finest in North America. But it will take more than that for me to get out my cozzy.
One of the earliest objectives in almost any town is to go to find the church. This is the aforementioned, and would you believe that I forgot to note to whom it is dedicated ... "yes, we would" - ed.
Behind it, flying the Canadian and the Quebecois flags is the Town Hall. That building used to be the private hospital of the Québec North Shore Paper Company, and they sold the edifice to the Municipality for the symbolic dollar when they cleared off to Baie Comeau.
The Municipality transformed it into the town hall and subsequently enlarged it to house the police and the fire brigade. However, those august bodies have since decamped elsewhere.
Yes, no doubt about it.
That object that I saw out in the distance beyond the arboriduc is indeed a dead ship. And having visited this morning the Sentier des Naufragés and also the Pointe-aux-Anglais where an entire British naval expedition came to grief, I've had to wait a whole 3 hours to find a shipwreck.
It's simply not good enough!
But anyway, she's called the Lady Eva and she has something of a story to tell.
She was a Greek ship dating from 1948 and came to Port Cartier in November 1977. When she arrived at the port she was required to undego an inspection and such was her condition that urgent repairs needed to be carried out before she could proceed further.
On the afternoon of Ist December, a violent storm sprang up and most of the ships immediately fled to safety in the sheltered deep-water harbour of Sept-Iles just up the coast.
But for one reason or another, the Lady Eva dragged her heels, or perhaps I should say dragged her anchor, and it wasn't until 17:00 that she set off, with the 6 Canadian marine engineers still aboard carrying out the repairs.
She had however emptied her ballast while she was here and so was tossed about on the seas like a cork. In addition, she had no map and her radar wasn't working.
By 19:20 she was in great difficulty and broadcast an SOS message. However it was not possible for any of the rescue tugs to set out and by 20:00 she was aground.
And here she sits, or, at least, what is left of her. Everything that was possible to salvage has been salvaged, and quite quickly after the disaster too, and all we have is the rusting hulk.
What surprises me about all of this is that at times the price of scrap metal has soared through the roof. At one period I was receiving £70 for a scrap car and that works out at about £50 per tonne for uncleaned and unsorted metal.
Here on the beach is probably about 1,000 tonnes of scrap metal and in the background of the first shot of the ship you will recall that there is a metal-processing plant.
You would have thought that with £50,000 ($80,000) sitting here on the beach not a cocksride away from the smelters, the Lady Eva would have disappeared into the furnaces a long time ago.
Down there is the Riviere des Rochers, and of course you cannot fail to notice the impressive waterfall in the background. Neither can you fail to notice the hydro-electric installations just there beside it.
As we've said so many times before ... "and you'll say again" - ed ... the availability of cheap local electricity was one of the major factors to everything that happened out here after World War II.
There's also a demolished bridge down there in the foreground. Maybe that was the line of the original road before this modern bridge was built.
From here I was back in the car but I didn't go too far as I ended up behind a school bus - one supplied by Thomas of Drummondville and we've driven past their place before.
This bus came to a stop (and so did all of the traffic of course) and disgorged a load of school kids in front of me, and they all streamed nonchalantly across the road.
Now when we were in Baie-Comeau yesterday we noticed a never-ending procession of salon de quilles - bowling alleys - everywhere. And I got to thinking ... "which doesn't happen very often" - ed ... that if you couldn't find a salon de quilles in the vicinity, you could have an enormous amount of fun with your car and a pile of kids disgorged from a school bus.
If you were up up on the Trans-Labrador Highway with me in 2010, you may remember that just after the ghost town of Gagnon we stumbled across the Cartier Railway line that brings the iron ore from Mont-Wright down to Port Cartier.
Well, this looks very much to me like the southern end of the railway line just here, down on the shore at Port Cartier. No trains though, which is always something of a disappointment to me. I've never yet seen one on this line.
The siding on the left, which is manually switched, seems to run over to that industrial plant over there in the background. The building seems to me to be something connected with the lumber industry. A pulp mill, perhaps.
When we were at Gagnon I did mention that down here at Port Cartier there was a huge steel mill run by Arcelor-Mittal. Down there at the bottom of this dead-end is the aforementioned.
It's to here that the output of the huge open-cast mine at Mont-Wright comes, and one imagines that it leaves out of the other end of the mill in nice little ingot-shapes for shipping to foundries all over the world.
Apart from all of this, Port Cartier has two other claims to fame.
©