Aug. 15
Near Quaqtaq,
I had the morning to kill so I took a walking tour of Kuujjuaq and the river’s edge. We’re 30 km from Ungava Bay but the river here is truly vast — perhaps a mile across. I think it’s shallow. The edges are very sandy — broad sand beaches that show evidence of great changes in water level.  Certainly no harbor here. Could it be tidal? I saw rapids below the town, but the tidal range here is enormous. There were two oil barges permanently beached perhaps ten feet above the water level — they appeared to be pumpers not carriers. There was a ‘hippie’ (?) settlement of traditional tents. A woman played in the sandy shallows with two small children for at least an hour.

I walked along the beach and up onto the rocky outcroppings that overlook the town and continue forever in every direction. We’re still not above the treeline — tamarack and black spruce reach substantial sizes, and the undergrowth is also large, mostly alder and willow. But the carpeting of the rocks is tundra-like, compact and intense. There are quantities of various berries, such as crowberry, blueberry, and cranberry, probably others as well, all edible but perhaps not tasty. It should be quite a bit more arctic in northern Labrador, where the cold current coming down the western side of the Davis Strait chills the coast.

The town itself is unremarkable until you take in the details of daily living. The older buildings are nondescript — simple well-insulated boxes with small windows. They don’t have the style that the Danish brought to Greenland. The newer buildings are more interesting in a modern-architecture sort of way. It’s still well-insulated boxes, mostly with metal siding, but there are pretensions, mainly skewing of the box shapes in strange ways and adding bright colors to give them some interest, if not attractiveness. Everything is on piers, presumably on permafrost.

There are no roads in and out, but the traffic within town is surprisingly incessant. I think people zoom around just to do it.  Pickups and 4WD cars of various kinds, numbers of ATVs used on the roads as cars, which makes sense. There are lots of government vehicles going this way and that; I guess the season for building and public works is very short. I thought the oil delivery trucks were very busy but then I realized they were sewage-pickup trucks roaming the neighborhoods. There are no underground pipes so there are three truck services to every building: water, sewage, and heating oil. It’s not like Greenland, where all the utility lines are above grade and insulated. I wonder which is cheaper to maintain.

I found Tim Donovan at the airport; he spent the night in the Montreal airport and got a morning flight. The flight to Quaqtaq left at 2PM and he was on it but they bumped me to a make-up flight at 5:30 — the extra people from yesterday’s cancelled flight. It was a small plane with two pilots and six passengers. A  cloud cover settled in but they had visibility for a few hundred feet above the ground, so they could land. I was met by the departing three crew members and relieved to see them; the Elskov really was there! And now we’re way north of the treeline. It makes Kuujjuaq seem like the tropics.

We were driven down to the “harbor”: a breakwater-enclosed basin which at low tide is completely empty! The tides are in the order of 25′. It was almost absurd. So Elskov was at anchor off the shore. We hopped into the zodiac, went on board, packed away the zodiac, and headed out to find a lee anchorage for the night, on the advice of the town manager whom Finley had befriended. No waiting around with Finley!