Wednesday, September 5, 2018 was our first full day in Saint-Mathieu on the Gaspe Peninsula along the banks of the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada. The day started rainy, so we decided to get a preview of Parc National du Bic, and then head over to Rimouski for a little shopping and lunch. After lunch, the weather began to clear, so we took the opportunity to visit the Pointe-au-Père Lighthouse.
This is actually the third lighthouse built on Pointe-Au-Père and was built in 1909 near the city of Rimouski. This city was well known in naval circles as the location of the pilot station for the Bas-Saint-Laurent (lower St. Lawrence) zone. The lighthouse is 108 feet tall, which makes it the second tallest in eastern Canada. It is built in a characteristic shape, employing eight concrete buttresses to support a slender central cylinder.
While the lighthouse is a Parks Canada National Historic Site, it is managed by "The Site Historique Maritime de la Pointe-au-Père," a maritime museum, that displays 200 years of maritime history, and includes the first submarine open to the public in Canada, HMCS Onondaga. In addition, The 'Empress of Ireland Pavilion' displays artifacts from the wreckage of the ocean liner RMS Empress of Ireland, which was sunk offshore in 1914. Since we've already been on a submarine and learned lots about shipwrecks from the Titanic Museum, we decided to just take the lighthouse tour. One hundred and twenty eight (128) steps later, Kathy leans against the tower window trying to catch her breath!
The lantern room holds a third-order Fresnel lens that produced a signature of four flashes of light every 7½ seconds visible for up to 30 kilometers. Petroleum vapour burned under an incandescent mantle was used as the illuminant in the new tower until the light was electrified in 1940.
A 400-watt bulb has been installed inside the Fresnel lens, but the light is not an official aid to navigation.
In 1975, the official light function was transferred to a 115 foot square skeleton tower located just northeast of the 1909 tower. Automation of the Pointe-au-Père Lighthouse occurred in 1988, marking the end of lightkeeping at the station, and the light atop the skeleton tower was decommissioned a decade later. With GPS and radar systems, ships don't need navigation aids like lighthouses and fog horns anymore.
After climbing back down the 128 steps, we wandered over to the old keepers house which has been turned into a museum displaying artwork depicting the various lighthouses around the Saint Lawrence.
There are a total of 40 lighthouses on the Lighthouse Trail around the St. Lawrence. The Gaspe Peninsula has 14 of them. Here are models of just a few of them:
As you know, we've been doing our best to collect as many Parks Canada Red Chairs as we could find during our adventures in the Maritimes. We can now officially add Phare-de-Pointe-au-Pere to our collection. Here is our official photo:
Here is the unofficial (selfy) photo:
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