Sunday morning. Not a breath of wind. The sun is making the entire tent radiate heat inwards. Mosquitoes and black flies are covering every surface of the tent, waiting for us to appear like room service breakfast. Pretty soon the mosquitoes abandon the field to their smaller but more aggressive and persistent cousins. Marie notices how cute they are wearing what appears to be furry yellow-striped knee socks!

Going for a pee requires more than courage this morning...

We have a quick breakfast inside the tent before covering ourselves head to toe with our paddling gear and pulling on mosquito net hoods.  A black cloud follows my everystep. I can't look at my legs. The surface of my black wetsuit instantly absorbs heat from the sun and has become a sprawling mass of black flies. A dragon fly appears behind me. It has also seen those flies and takes advantage of this unexpected feast. I can hear it catch each fly as it zigzags around my head. We'd already noticed how big the dragon flies grew here - over 4" long. I now understand how they get that way. In spite of the heat, we keep our hoods on until we are well in the middle of the bay's open water, half-way to the village of St.Augustine, about 4 miles North-East of the camp site we just left.

The tide is quickly going down and sand bars appear everywhere in the bay. Boats follow a marked channel that makes a long detour before reaching the village. Our shallow draft allows us to take an almost straight line, in water ranging from depths of several feet to just a couple of inches. We scrape the soft sandy bottom on several occasions and have to fight an increasingly strong current as we near the mouth of the St.Augustine river. We can guess how shallow the water is in front of us by the way wavelets form as the current races over sand bars. The water is noticeably warm here et reddish in colour, just as the sand. We stop for a quick rest and a few gulps of water, with the kayaks nosing into a sand bar, before the final push to the village beach. It took us two hours to cover 4 miles...

It's about a quarter to one and there are boats pulled on the beach, with people busy fixing gear, milling around the little convenience store and single pump gas station just across the street. As soon as we touch the shore, we are greeted by a couple of by-standers. Although there are practically no rooms available (all taken to house the personnel working on a new municipal sewage system - the whole village is a construction site), we are quickly directed to someone who has a room to spare. Esther Jane Driscoll leads me to her house and explains that she has promised to bring her daughter and a friend to the beach for the afternoon. "Here's your room, is everything ok? Don't worry about all the stuff, just push it aside - I rent this room to a young girl during the school year but she's not here now. Use the bathroom if you want. Just check all the rooms, you'll find it eventually. Bye!". I return to the beach where Marie was looking after the kayaks and we carry our gear to the house leaving the boats on the soft sand, above the high water mark.

We enjoy a warm shower, the first one in 10 days and try to go for a walk around the village. The flies are worst than ever. Even the locals are complaining. We retreat back to the house with a bag of chips, a beer, our trip journal and a book...  In mid afternoon, Esther and the girls reappear, totally drenched. A sudden shower surprised them as they were about to ride back on their 4-wheeler. Esther runs one of the two restaurants in St.Augustine. Chez Holly is named after her youngest daughter. The other one, "Restaurant des soeurs", is owned by her three nieces. Both are just off the beach close to where we landed.

A bit later, we find Esther at her job as we go for supper at Chez Holly. We treat ourselves to freshly made "Lobster Club" and Crab Club" sandwiches, followed by a delicious piece of homemade cake for dessert, and all the gossip we care to hear as friends and customers drop in for a meal or just a cup of coffee. The coolness of the evening has chased some of the flies as we take a little stroll. St.Augustine is home to about 790 people while the small, and relatively recent, native community of Pakua Shipi (meaning the Dry River), across the river, has a population of about 300. There is a small airfield with twice daily service linking Natashquan, Chevery, St.Augustine and Blanc Sablon to Seven Islands. A new gravel road links Pakua Shipi to the federal wharf where we stopped last night. The two communities are trying to get the government to build a bridge linking across the river to simplify the transport of people and merchandise between the port and the village.

We're up early on Monday morning and kick start the day with a Chez Holly breakfast : bacon, eggs, a thick slice of country loaf, orange juice and two coffees for Marie: life is tough....  Check phone messages, modify and confirm our return reservations on the Nordik, search e-mails for news of our kids as one is moving away and the other is leaving on a trip abroad. Then a quick trip to the store to replace our recently deceased can opener and to get potable water. Tap water is not safe and every one buys their drinking water in bulk from the grocery or hardware stores who are equipped with purification units : $1 a gallon. A new filtration plant is supposed to open in a few months.

Finally, a little bit before noon, we embark on our loading ritual in order to take advantage of the ebbing tide (slowly but surely, we are learning our lessons). Quickly swept by the current, we meander through the sand bars of St.Augustine Bay, angling towards the East to find the entrance to Bougainville Pass. The afternoon goes quickly as we leisurely paddle to Kingston Bay where we find our most beautiful camp site yet - as we seem to do every night on this trip - just as the sun sets.

As we lie in the quietness of our tent under a clear sky, I feel a special excitement : tomorrow, our trip will take us to a place called Shekatika. This spot is marked on many maps, from a National Geographic Atlas of the world to a Quebec road map and our marine charts, yet nobody we asked so far seems to know anything about it. Strange...