Île du Havre aux Maisons Travel Guide

After driving through the hilly part of the island, you will find that the east coast is also well worth a look. Here, the lighthouse at Cap Alright helps to guide ships into the nearby harbour on Cap-aux-Meules. On the distant horizon (in the very centre of the photo), you can also barely make out the hills of the isolated Ile D'Entree (not clear in this photo).

The mostly Acadian population of this island continues their tradition of small, neat houses, often brightly coloured. This one caught my attention because of its picnic table perched high on top of the nearby hill.

Every day and everywhere we went, the wind blew - sometimes hard and sometimes not so hard. If you head further north toward Ile aux Loups, the highway along the Dunes du Sud takes you past an experimental wind turbine site built by Hydro-Quebec in 1977. The unusual thing here is that the turbine is an unconventional vertical axis 0.23 MW Darrieus 'egg-beater' type, towering high into the sky. During inspection for bearing noise a year after its construction, the rotor suddenly started rotating and, since it did not have any brakes or electrical load on it, it exceeded its design speed and crashed to the ground. It was obviously rebuilt but the design has not been very successful world-wide. This one is now retired and was not moving on any of our trips past it. Power on the island, since 1991 is supplied by a 70 MW diesel station in Cap-aux-Meules, with transmission lines running up and down the dunes beside the highways, as seen on the left of this sand-blown photo. Note that it would take 280 wind generators of the size shown to match the diesel station output, and then you would still need something for backup power in cases when the wind stops blowing!