Tag Archives: royal navy

Thursday 22nd November 2018 – I HAD A …

… better night last night, just for a change. Asleep before midnight and slept right through until the alarm went off.

I was off on my travels during the night. I vaguely remember being on board ship somewhere, but apart from that, nothing at all.

Once I was up and out of bed, I had breakfast and then organised the photos from last night which I had forgotten to upload. And the *.ftp program seems to work fine, which is good news.

A check of the thermometer showed me that last night the temperature had dropped down to 1°C. Won’t be long now before freezing point is reached.

Thursday is shopping day so I had a shower and a clean-up, and then put a load of washing on. What an exciting life I lead, hey?

black friday rue couraye granville manche normandy franceOn my way up the rue Couraye, I was noticing all of the signs for “Black Friday”. yet another Transatlantic custom that people over here have started to embrace.

But there are clearly some people who haven’t quite grasped the principle of Black Friday. How can you possibly have a Black Friday sale that lasts for a week?

But it’s something that I’m seeing more and more. People are losing all of their traditional customs and habits in the relentless search for profit, although some of the instances that I have quoted on here just recently would bring that into question.

fibre optic cable Avenue du Maréchal Leclerc granville manche normandy franceWe feature every now and again the progress of the installation of the fibre-optic cable around the town.

Here in the Avenue du Maréchal Leclerc just a little higher up the hill from the railway station they are now digging out a channel on the pavement so that they can pass the cable higher up the hill presumably in the direction of the telephone exchange

The date of connection is getting closer and closer. And I for one can’t wait.

christmas decorations Avenue du Maréchal Leclerc granville manche normandy franceThe other week we saw them erecting the Christmas Tree in the Place de la Gare and on Saturday we saw it in position.

To further add to the chaos in the Avenue du Maréchal Leclerc, they are now erecting the Christmas decorations across the street.

The local council was there with a cherry-picker, and a couple of municipal police personnel directing the traffic around th obstruction.

I shook my head and went on to LIDL where I did a pile of shopping. Nothing special but they have now run out of grapes which is a tragedy, and the packets of nuts that I use in my muesli were still on offer so I bought a few more packets.

residence des granvillaises Rue Etoupefour granville manche normandy franceA few weeks ago I posted a photograph of a building with “Residence des Granvillaises” emblazoned thereupon.

On the way back from the shops I took a little diversion to the Rue Etoupefour to have a good look at the entrance to the building to see what it looked like at street level.

It’s not anything at all significant, which is probably why I haven’t noticed it at all during all of the times that I have passed by.

Back here I had a coffee and then carried on with the photos from earlier. As well as having a little doze for a short while. It seems to have become a regular thing these days after any kind of exertion.

Lunch was the baguette from LIDL with salad and more of my home-made hummus. It really is quite a fiery concoction and tastes delicious.

This afternoon I added the photos to a couple more blog entries. if you go to this page and work your way forward you can see them.

fishing trawler granville manche normandy franceThere wasn’t a great deal of excitement going on during my afternoon walk.

There was a speck of something out to sea and thinking that it might be Thora coming back, I took a photo of it and enlarged it when I returned home.

But it wasn’t Thora at all but a fishing trawler out there doing the business offshore. And I for one am looking forward to the excitement when the UK leaves the EU and we start to have fishing fights between the French and Channel Island fishermen.

I can still remember the 1960s when a bunch of Icelandic trawlermen took on the might of the Royal Navy during the Cod Wars – and defeated them hands-down. French fishermen are far more resolute than the Icelanders, and the Royal Navy is a mere shadow of what it was in the 1960s

fishing trawler ship repairers port de granville harbour manche normandy franceMy perambulations took me around the headland where I could overlook the shipyard.

Remember the pink and white candy-striped trawler that we saw the other day being lifted out of the water at the ship repairers?

We caught a glimpse of it last night up on blocks, but here it is today in the daylight. I’ll be keen to see what they are doing to it and how the work progresses over time.

aztec lady port de granville harbour manche normandy franceAnd that wasn’t all the excitement down in the shipyard either.

It seems that the mystery of why the Aztec Lady has turned up in Granville has been resolved. Here she is, in the shipyard, up on blocks like the rest of the ships in here.

It looks as if I missed out on the hoisting ceremony which is a shame because that is something that is quite interesting.

aztec lady port de granville harbour manche normandy franceAnyway, it enables us to have a good look at her while she’s here.

And we can also keep our eye on her and see what work is being done. It must be important.

On that note, I came back here for a coffee and to start work. And the work in question is Day Four of my trip to the High Arctic.

I need to push on with that otherwise it will never be finished. And there are plenty of pages like that already.

Tea should have been vegan sausages, but I didn’t notice until I’d started the vegetables that the sausages were somewhat iffy. Instead, a vegan burger was rustled up and it tasted just as good with the vegan cheese sauce as the sausages would have done.

No-one about at all during the evening walk, except for a solitary jogger. Nothing at all worth photographing zither tonight, so I can have an evening off.

On that note, I’ll go to bed. Plenty of work to do tomorrow.

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Wednesday 7th October 2015 – I HAD YET ANOTHER …

… really bad night last night. Only on this occasion there wasn’t any particular reason for it. I was still awake at 02:00 this morning, which is not like me over here, is it? And worse still, I had no idea why that might have been.

I crawled under the shower and then made a coffee but I still didn’t feel much better.

grande riviere baie des chaleurs gaspe peninsula highway 132 quebec canadaAnyway, to wake myself up, I made myself another mug of coffee and went down to the harbour for a walk around and some fresh air.

And, strangely enough, this would have been quite a good place to have stayed for the night. There was plenty of space here and there were quite a few boats up on stocks. I could have tucked myself in here quite happily in the peace and quiet and been well away.

Still, you live and learn, don’t you?

la roche percée baie des chaleurs gaspe peninsula highway 132 quebec canadaHaving fuelled up Strider, I set off again and after a good drive I pulled up on a rest area to admire the view and drink another coffee.

We’ve all seen this rock before haven’t we? It’s La Roche Percée, the Pierced Rock, and we came by here before. It’s said to be one of the hundreds of places where Jacques Cartier made a landing and erected a cross.

If he really did land at all of the places that are claimed as his landing sites, he would probably be still out there now, but this time it’s probably correct because no-one could invent a description of this particular site without having visited it and there isn’t another place that resembles this in the whole of the St Lawrence estuary.

I was away with the fairies for about an hour up here too in the lovely sunny late-morning, and then I set off again to continue my travels.

perce baie des chaleurs gaspe peninsula highway 132 quebec canadaWe’ve seen the town of Percé before and so I won’t trouble you with another photo of the town itself. The only thing that you need to remember is that half of the buildings are motels and the other half are tourist attractions.

But all of that notwithstanding, we certainly haven’t seen the town and the rock from this angle. And although you can’t see the hole in the rock, this is certainly the most exciting angle to view everything. But itwas quite an effort to take the photo. There’s nowhere to park except at the side of the road and there’s an endless stream of traffic up the hill.

railway locomotive station gaspe baie des chaleurs gaspe peninsula highway 132 quebec canadaWe finally solve the mystery of the railway when we arrive at the town of Gaspé. All of the railway installations have been swept away and there’s a huge tourist information building constructed on the site.

And parked out at the back of it is the train here. We’ve seen dozens of locomotives like this and so I think that it might be one of the GP38 family, but I’ll need to check up on that.

railway train locomotive station gaspe baie des chaleurs gaspe peninsula highway 132 quebec canadaThe girl in charge of the tourist information office told me the story of the train, so now I can tell you all.

VIARAIL stopped running the trains to Montreal about 6 years ago and abandoned the line, so she said. It’s now a tourist scenic railway that runs just as far as Percé and back again in the summer months with no connection to the main line at Compbelltown, which should make life interesting if they ever need to replace the loco or send it away for repair.

But that’s not likely to happen as the service didn’t run this year. It seems that important work is needed to be done on the line but the Quebec Government hasn’t done it. “Maybe they’ll do it ready for next year” she said, and I’m not convinced that she believed it either.

The latest update on all of this is that Jean-François Turcotte told me “that was RS-18u 1849; it’s been trucked-out to the active portion of the line and is now used to haul woodchip, cement and windmill parts along with three other RS-18u’s. The carriages for the former l’Amiral tourist train are still in Gaspé, AFAIK.”

And Anthony Bernard Prince said ” A lot of track maintenance work will be carried out on the 3rd section of our railroad between Port-Daniel and Gaspé this year (2021). The majority of the work will be carried out between Chandler and Douglastown. 15,000 ties will be replaced, many crossings will be replaced, and thousands of tons of ballast will be spread.”

The town of Gaspé is a nightmare to negotiate as the whole road system is torn up for repair. I eventually made it to Tim Horton’s but didn’t stay long. Instead, I moved on and I’m now esconced at the site of the old World War II military defences for the bay. It’s a little-known fact that I had the UK fallen to the Germans in World War II, the Royal Navy would have come and set themselves up over here in the Gaspé.

And on the way out of Gaspé on the way to here here I drove past two motels that I hadn’t noticed in 2010. Where were they when I needed them?

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Wednesday 3rd November 2010 – AND NOW THAT MY MEMORY CARD READER SEEMS TO BE WORKING …

beautiful scenery gaspesie gaspe peninsula quebec canada… I can show you some more pictures of the Gaspe Peninsula to make you realise just how beautiful it is and how happy I would be to stay on here.

In fact I’m still here now despite my words of yesterday, for I missed the 17:00 ferry by a country mile. That was mostly because I had spent a nice hour or two wandering around the town of Gaspe to see what there was to see – of which there was plenty.

beautiful scenery gaspesie gaspe national park quebec canada
I then went off down to the headland for a nosy and I was still there at 13:00. One claim to fame of Gaspe Bay is that it was fortified as a base for the Royal Navy if the UK fell to the Germans in 1940 and not only is there a fort in the hills to protect the harbour, it also still has its guns.

And after a bit of a clamber and a hike across the cliffs I managed to track it down. And yes, its guns are still there as you can see.

beautiful scenery gaspe national park quebec canada
I couldn’t get down to the far end of the Point though. What with one thing and another (and once you get started you would be surprised just how many other things there are) I’d left it far too late to go there on foot. It’s not possible to go all the way down to the end.

But not to worry. There were still plenty of things to see in the area and I can always come back here again, can’t I?

Now followers of my outpourings will know that I wrote some stuff about the coffin ships – the sailing ships that took the Irish to the New World in the wake of the potato famine in the late 1840s.

I mentioned the cholera that they endured and there was also the starvation on board ship if supplies ran out, as well as countless other sufferings that the passengers had to endure.

memorial April 28th 1847 ship Carrick's of Whitehaven cap des rosiers gaspe quebec canada
But one suffering that must always have been on their minds was the risk of shipwreck and I went to visit the site of the shipwreck of one such coffin ship – the Carrick’s of Whitehaven out of Sligo that ran aground just off Gaspe Point on 28th April 1847.

It’s pretty much largely forgotten now, being isolated in the middle of a huge new road system (such as would be huge out here) and the monument to the 187 immigrants lost and the communal grave of the 84 whose bodies were recovered is nevertheless pretty poignant.

There was a further update to this story at the beginning of June 2019.

There has always been an apocryphal story about a mass grave relating to victims of the disaster, and starting in 2011 following a severe storm, bones started to be washed ashore close to the memorial.

This was followed by the unearthing of several other sets of bones on the beach in 2016.

An analysis of the bones was published by Parks Canada, which suggests that the age of the bones together with the likely diet identified during a DNA analysis corresponds with that which one might expect to see in victims of the Carrick’s disaster.

marconi radio station pointe a la renommee gaspe quebec canadaYou might remember me talking about Marconi and his bouncing of messages across the Atlantic. Of course once they reached land at Cape Race they would need to be bounced by shore stations and we saw one of those on the coast of Labrador.

The next one further down is on the north shore of the Gaspe Peninsula here at Pointe à la Renommée and after trekking about 6kms down a dirt track that would be a match for the bad ones of Labrador and then descending 150 metres to the shoreline I managed to find the remains of that as well.

motel le campagnard matane quebec canadaAnd so I’m still on the Gaspe – in a motel in Matane.

It’s Thursday tomorrow so there’s only one ferry and that’s at 08:00 so that’s a 06:00 alarm call. I won’t be up for long. And if I can’t get a place on that then I shall have to drive down the south bank of the St Lawrence and head for Quebec City that way.

I can’t afford the time to wait until Friday to get across.

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