August, 2008

Our first full day in St. Pierre began with the partial eclipse at sunrise. You had to be in Nunavit to see the total eclipse. We took a bus tour of the island, saw the museums, and took advantage of the French cuisine at every opportunity. Dad kept thinking he was in Mexico and in every restaurant he started speaking the wait staff in Spanish!

It was here that we got the sad news of Stew Webber’s passing. Dad flew home for the funeral and I sailed to Fortune, Newfoundland to clear back in with Canada Customs. I ended up being weathered in for three days by a northeaster. One local tried to make me feel better by telling me about one cruiser who was weathered in there for two weeks. He also told me about the northeaster that washed away half of the graveyard when he was a kid. He remembers the tombstones and skeletons all over the beach!

When the weather finally broke the forecast was for another week of easterlies. My plan to go to St. John’s no longer made any sense. I would have to fight easterly winds all the way there and then the prevailing southwesterlies would return and I would have to fight them all the way back. It made more sense to explore the southwest coast of Newfoundland as thoroughly as possible.

With that in mind I set sail for Grand Bank. There I toured the Museum of Local History in restored ship owners house. From the widow’s walk on the roof, you could see for miles, including a view down to Windsong’s masthead. I also enjoyed the dinner theatre production of Ed and Ed do Florida, a hilarious comedy about two Newfie’s exiled to Florida.

In the harbour was a dragger over 100 feet long that had been damaged by a rouge wave on the Grand Banks. The wave smashed in several of the windows on the bridge, 40 feet above the waterline, destroying all of her electronics. The damage was so extensive that she had be sold into salvage.

From there I crossed Fortune Bay to Harbour Breton where I met up with the Irish couple I had last seen in Grey River. They were in the process of provisioning and preparing the boat for their crossing back to Ireland.

I tried to spend the night in Jerseyman’s harbour. It was an eery place with two shipwrecks and the only trace of the old town was two cabins, a few stone foundations, and the headstones in the cemetery. Unfortunately, my anchor would not dig through the kelp and I wound up back at a dock in Harbour Breton. Dockage was the usual Newfie rate of $10 a night, so I was happy to pay.

Next stop was the outport of McCallum. On the way I went through the Pass Island Tickle. A tickle is a narrow pass between an island and the mainland. On my way into the tickle I had a dolphin blow 40 feet off of my stern quarter. I jumped so high that I nearly threw my book overboard! Of course, the whole pod was gone before I could figure out where to point my camera. Pass Island was another ghost town with a manned light station, one cabin, some foundations and another cemetery of lonely white headstones.

On my way out of the tickle and into Hermitage Bay a humpback crossed my bow. He glided across and when he appeared below my genny he showed me his flukes and sounded. I had just lived the Stan Rogers song Free in the Harbour. I was on Hermitage Bay where the whales make free in the harbour!

When I arrived in McCallum, Dan and Kathy where there aboard Sea Star. I met them for the first time in St. Pierre, where they had invited Dad and me aboard for dinner. I rafted off of them and explored the town. It was a much bigger outport than Grand Bruit or Grey River. The school looked like it had four classrooms. The basketball court was built on a wooden platform. There was no flat surface in town big enough to make such a thing on the ground. It looked like you had to be really careful because if the ball went out of bounds, it might go over a cliff into the Atlantic!

I ended up buddy boating with Sea Star for the next two and a half weeks. Our first stop was Hare Bay, a waterfall filled fjord. Next was the outport of Francois. On the way, I ducked into Devil’s bay to see Blow me Down, a 1000 foot rock climbing wall that is comparable to El Capitan in Yosemite. Truly incredible! I’d try to describe it, but a picture is worth 1000 words.

I stopped for lunch at Recontre (Round counter) West. Recontre was once the most prosperous community on this coast, dating back at least 200 years. They built a cold storage plant when things changed over from salted to frozen cod. It was to no avail, and the community was relocated in 1970. All that was left was five cabins, the foundations of the cold storage plant, lots of pilings, piles of boards, and rows of lonesome tombstones. I spoke to the "ghosts" who were still there as cottagers. Two were original inhabitants. One had been cottaging there since they closed the town, and the other had not been back since he had lived there as a boy 38 years ago.

Francois itself was another beautiful little outport of stilt houses built on the talus slope along the shore line of a cliff ringed bay.

The prettiest place along the coast was Aviron Bay. We spent the night anchored at the base of a waterfall cascading down a 1200 foot sandstone cliff.

I left Sea Star for a couple of days so that I could go to Ramea for laundry and supplies. While I was doing laundry at the hostel, I met Jonas, a photography student from Montreal. I offered him a ride to Burgeo, the setting of Farley Mowat’s A Whale for the Killing, and he ended up staying aboard for a couple of nights. We explored Sandbanks Provincial Park. It had gorgeous long sandy beaches and the site of the ghost town of Upper Burgeo. The only trace was yet another forlorn cemetery.

We had many interesting characters stop by the dock in Burgeo. There were retired fisherman and a light keeper, but the most interesting was the author of Exit from the Twilight Zone. Soon to be published, it is the true story of how he signed aboard to deliver a 150 fishing trawler to Nigeria and ended up being kidnapped by the Nigerians. He spent three months sleeping on a concrete floor while they tried to milk him of every cent he had before the Canadian Embassy got him out.

Jonas continued his trip east through the outports by ferry and Sea Star rejoined me. We pounded into 20 knot headwinds to Grand Bruit. Windsong held her own with the 44 foot 20 ton Sea Star, but started to take in water through several leaks in the deck that have yet to be resolved. Fortunately, it was sunny in Grand Bruit so I could dry things out.

Rose Blanche with its beautifully restored 135 year old lighthouse has our next stop. Here I experimented with allowing Spot to go ashore. She ended up covered in creosote from crawling through the pier and it took forever to find her to get her back on board.

We spent a day in Rose Blanche hiking to the lighthouse then motored around the corner to Harbour Le Cou where we grabbed a mooring and took the dinghy to Petites. Petites is an outport that was abandoned in 2003. We could easily have entered with our boats but the cruising guide recommended against it.

Petites was more like the ghost towns I have seen in Northern Ontario. Most of the buildings are still standing and just starting to fall into disrepair. The big difference was that these places had been stripped bare, while those in Northern Ontario looked like the owners had intended to come back. A few houses are still being used as cottages and we spoke to one of the "ghosts". He was born there, and had been away for 54 years before his wife decided that they should move back to retire.

We moved to Bay Le Moine for the night, then continued on the Port aux Basques. Before I even threw the dock lines Spot jumped onto the dock and found her way into the bunk on my neighbours trawler Lady L. Later that night she snuck onto the dock and made her way ashore. The local teenagers helped me find her about an hour later under the board walk. From then on, the teenagers all knew me as "the guy who lost his cat".

Port aux Basques was the place to refuel, resupply and meet other cruisers. Along with Lady L, we met an Icelandic/Floridian couple aboard and 70 foot ketch Dagny, and George and Kim of Adagio. George was the ultimate tech support for cruisers. He got Dan and I all updated with the latest software for reading GRIB weather files, and introduced us to the signal booster he uses to connect to the internet any time his is in a town.

We waited two days before we finally got a weather window and crossed the Cabot Straight to Dingwall. It was a beautiful broad reach, well worth waiting for. In Dingwall we tied up at the fisherman’s co-op with help from a local sailor and retired fisherman named Ham. He gave us a tour of his beautiful 50 foot steel sloop that he had purchased on Lake Ontario.

We were weathered in the next day as the harbour entrance was foaming with surf. We took advantage by relaxing on our boats and eating at the local restaurant.

In the morning I said goodbye to Sea Star and set sail for the Magdalen Islands, an outpost of Quebec in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Magdalens are an archipelago of twelve sandstone islands connected by long beaches called tombolos. I landed at Ile D’Entrée, one of the few island not connected to any of the others.

After spending the night, I climbed the big hill (actually called Big Hill) in the middle of the island. It was quite a contrast to the ruggedness of Newfoundland. Things can actually grow here so there were farms and livestock. Big Hill was part of a park set aside for community pasture and you could see the cows on the slopes of the surrounding hills.

In the afternoon I broad reached across to Havre Aubert doing about 7 knots. There I met another singlehander who used to run whale watching boats for Ham in Dingwall. Small world! The wind that brought me here was nothing compared to what was being forecasted for the night and the next day. So, I got myself tied in well and braced myself for the blow.