Arrival in St. Pierre

October 7, 2025 | pwsadmin | St Pierre and Newfoundland

Sept 2, 2025

As we approached from the southwest, the western side of the island was dark except for the slight illumination from a setting moon and a few navigational beacons off the coast. St Pierre is only 4 nautical miles, north-to-south, and 3 miles, east-to-west. The west coast is a wall of rocky bluffs rising up to a plateau 400 to 500 feet above the sea. Only a faint glow in the sky on the far side of the island hinted that this was more than an inert mass of rock.

Motoring up the west side, the lights of a fishing vessel off to port passed us by, no doubt on its way to the neighboring island of Miquelon. Following the recommendation of the guide book, we would loop over the north end of the island, passing between the dark shores of St. Pierre and a small island to the north. Rounding the corner, the first of the channel markers warned us not to pass too close to an outcropping of rocks off the northeast shore. A series of buoys marked the safe passage to the mooring field inside a series of breakwaters.

Approach around St. Pierre

Red-Right-Returning … a pneumonic learned by anyone who ever went to sailing camp. When returning to a harbor, keep the red buoys to the starboard side of the boat and the green buoys to port and you’ll be in the channel. But, just in case, we double-checked the charts to see if Red-Right-Returning was the convention in St Pierre, France. This concern was not without cause since, in French Polynesia and the EU, it’s the other way around. (Green-Right-Returning? Perhaps it sounds better in French.) In any case, St. Pierre, France adheres to the North America convention. Armed with that knowledge and the chart-plotter, we carefully began our approach through the breakwaters and into the mooring field.

The water in the harbor had calmed to a black mirror reflecting the lights of the surrounding shoreline. All hands were on deck, providing a sanity check to make sure the marks on the chart matched the buoys in the water. Threading our way past the fifth breakwater we motored our way into in the area designated in the guidebook as the mooring field. I was expecting mooring balls more suited in size to our boat. Instead, they were large floating steel disks at least a meter in diameter with an oversized ring on the top, looking better suited for a small cargo ship than a 40-foot sailing boat.

St. Pierre Harbor (Google Earth)

After motoring by the first few, we decided on one out in the middle of the field. From the helm, the mooring becomes hidden by the bow on the final approach. Getting in close enough to secure a line is a combination of remembering where it was a moment ago, combined with instructions from the foredeck crew. Over the years I’ve tried to resist the temptation to repeatedly ask if they have it yet. I’ve learned that I’ll be one of the first to know. In this case, the large size of the ring on the top was making it difficult.

Unlike is typical back in the US, there was no helpful wand sticking up the air making it easy to simply reach over and pull in the mooring. We’d been alerted by fellow sailor, Tom Amory, back in Rockport, Maine to the fact that the only attach point for moorings in St. Pierre would be a ring on top. We had bought a special tool before the trip, just for the purpose of threading our line through such a fitting. But it was not designed for the large ring on the mooring we were trying to snag. Despite this challenge, somehow the crew managed to feed though a line and I got the welcomed call that we were secure.

Meanwhile, as we were busy securing our mooring, someone had been hailing us from the far shore. By the time we were ready to pay better attention, a car had motored around the harbor to be in better earshot. It was now nearly 11pm, (in one or other of the three time zones associated with this trip). We understood that whoever was calling was asking for our passports but it was not clear whether he was asking for the boat to come in as well. Given my strong reluctance to bring Lillian into an unfamiliar harbor at night, I opted for my preferred option which was to commission the zodiac and use it to ferry across our passports and any other documents I thought might be of interest.

I refer the reader to a subsequent blog entitled “The Zodiac” for details on what is involved with getting the zodiac off the deck and operational. For now, suffice it to say it involves a not-insignificant amount of effort and the crew did a commendable job in getting me and it ready to motor over to the official.

He could not have been friendlier or more helpful. I climbed out of the zodiac carrying our passports and my red notebook, which contains copies of virtually all the documents in which custom agents around the world have expressed interest at one time or another. The Island of St. Pierre was refreshingly straight-forward. The officer had seen us approaching on the AIS and taken the trouble to come out to meet us. After welcoming us to St. Pierre, he recorded our passports and had me fill out the boat’s registration information, letting me use the hood of his car as a writing desk. He explained that I would need to bring the boat into the dock in the morning and contact customs. If custom hadn’t shown up in an hour, we were free to go get croissants. That sounded very French.

The next morning Denise and I took the zodiac into the inner harbor to survey the docking situation. Denise was with me in case French was needed, but it turned there was no need. The dock was wide open. We zipped back to the boat and half-an-hour later were securely tied to the pier. The customs agents showed up, as advertised, and we were officially entered and authorized to replace our yellow quarantine flag with the French courtesy flag.

Nous étions arrivés