Don't Try This at Home

July 14, 2009

The Punchbowl, Labrador

53°15.0N

055° 45.1W

Charred timbers, empty fuel tanks . . . not a war zone but all that’s left of a bustling marine service center in the middle of nowhere.  Capable of seating over 200 at its restaurant, packing, processing and shipping fish and putting people up in its hotel, after the fisheries collapse The Punchbowl is now just a burnt out shell.

But the huge government wharf was in excellent condition and tied on the inside was Caledonian Princess, a 25 foot sailboat we’d met in Battle Harbour.  Wade and Coleen were traveling with their daughters, Julie & Elizabeth.  From St. Lunaire on the Northern Peninsula, Wade was showing them where he grew up. 

A fog induced lay day was spent walking around the deserted buildings and across the rise to abandoned cabins.  Wade and Coleen regaled us with tales of living in this beautiful country, moose in the backyard and ski doing in the winter.  Wade’s brother had a near miss last winter when his boat overturned on a freak wave in early April. Clad in a float suit, he pulled himself onto a bit of ice and a gas can floated up for him to sit on. After two days of singing hymns he spotted the Coast Guard boat cutting through the ice to get him.  It’d been a 

very near miss.

The big event was that night.  Wade invited us to a bonfire.  This wasn’t just any bonfire.  Built on the concrete area in front of what had been the fish plant, Wade had made a bench seat and piled the fire with burnable remains from the fish plant.

I’ve heard fires crackle and pop but this was . . . explosive!  And I mean literally.  We were settled on the bench, enjoying the flames and heat when

kaboom!  The whole fire structure heaved up about a foot, concrete chunks shot out, sparks flew and we all jumped back.  We stood around laughing and talking about the near miss until the heat and flames lured us closer.  After some debate we decided it was the metal pieces in the struts expanding in the heat. So we stopped putting those in.  Time went by and then . . . kaboom!  We all ran.  As Russ said, “Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  OK so it wasn’t the metal pieces.  Final conclusion, it was the concrete.  The heat was causing different stones or air pockets in the concrete to expand and the pressure was causing the explosions. 

 It was the most memorable bonfire I’ve ever attended!

 On a bummer note – You know that niggling feeling you have when you’re packing for a trip that you’ve forgotten something really important but you just can’t remember what it is?  Standing in the devastation of The Punch Bowl as a gust of wind blew my contact into never, never land I remembered what it was – spare contacts!  I have 5 pairs of glasses and lots of contact solution but only one pair of contacts.  What was I thinking?  The photo at the top is me looking for the contact.

 

 

This is a very easy and yummy dessert.  Enjoy!

Simple Pear & Apple Tart

3 tbl brown sugar

3 tbl butter, melted

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground ginger

1 sheet of refrigerated pie crust dough

2 medium pears, halved, cored & sliced thick

2 medium apples, halved, cored & sliced thick

1 egg slightly beaten

1 tbl slivered almonds

2 tbl. sugar

Preheat oven to 350.  Coat baking sheet with cooking spray.  Combine brown sugar, butter, cinnamon and ginger in bowl and mix well.  

Unroll dough onto baking sheet.  Place fruit wedges in overlapping circles.  Leave a 2" border of doubh.  Fold dough edges up and over edge of fruit and press to seal.  Drizzle butter/sugar mixture over fruit.  Sprinkle with almonds, brush dough edges with egg, and sprinkle with sugar.  

Bake 30-35 minutes or until golden brown.  Serve with ice cream, whipped cream, raspberries or just plain.  It's delish!  I've left off the almonds and sugar and not missed them.

 

Outports

July 12, 2009

Murray's Harbour

  52°27.4N  

055°41.1W

Murray’s is a beautiful spot and our first experience with an abandoned outport.  Outports are the name for small communities that sprung up close to the fishing grounds, anywhere from a few houses to over 500 people.  The government has been encouraging movement to more centralized places so they don’t have to provide services to these isolated communities. Abandoned outports litter the coast, stark evidence of the old way of life.  It begs the question, “Are the residents better off today than when they were living more independently?” “What’s necessary for happiness?”  It’s easy to romanticize the outport life but lack of medical care and schooling were balanced against independence and proximity to fishing.  When the fishery collapsed it spelled the end for most of the remaining outports. 

It’s a strange feeling to look out our ports and see all these silent houses, some falling down and some obviously still used as weekend get-aways.  No lights warm the windows.  No children play on the swing set.

Russ went ashore last night to get us snow from a snowfield for our icebox and in the process lost one lens to his prescription sunglasses.  It felt like a fruitless mission to find them.  Eureka!  It was laying on the edge of the snowfield.  Our lucky day.

Kitchen Party!

 July 11, 2009

Battle Harbor, Labrador                                                                                                                    52°16.4N                                                                                                                                        055°35.2W

Somebody’s got a fiddle

Someone else brought a guitar

Bobby’s got a squeeze box  . . .

 

Goin’ Up - a traditional Newfoundland song

Lantern light spilled from the oldest house in Battle Harbour.  Music slid from the cracks and floated across the quiet harbor.  Crowded into the kitchen were over a dozen men, 3 guitars, an accordion, some harmonicas (played by Russ) and me. 

 Earlier in the day, 2 twenty-foot ski type boats pulled into what’d been known as the “Capitol of Labrador”, Battle Harbor.  The seven occupants were from St. Anthony’s on their yearly fishing, music playing trek down the Labrador and we were lucky enough to share this spot with them.

Gazing around the room it was easy to be transported back in time and wonder how many kitchen parties this particular kitchen had seen.  I think there are more musical instruments and people with musical ability per capita in Newfoundland/Labrador than perhaps anywhere else in the world. 

 Our stay at Battle Harbor was full of magic: a harbor crammed with ice bergs including this fellow.  Is it a sphinx or a lion or something else?

Humpback whales teaming together to chase small fish into a cove, creating a bubble net around the fish and then rising up through the swarm, mouths open were our nighttime show.  Music threaded through it all and on a more mundane note – showers and laundry.

 

Down North on the Labrador

 July 9, 2009

Red Bay, Labrador

 Down North . . . huh? Isn’t North up?  Geographically speaking for people in the northern hemisphere it’s up, but for sailors it’s down.  Downwind that is.   Prevailing winds are from the southwest so heading up the coast you’ll be sailing with the wind behind you . . . downwind! 

 The crossing was a breeze and w were actually sailing a bit.  Russ napped and I prepared fish chowder with the cod given us by the Freida M.  Chop onions.  Look for bergy bits.  Chop celery.  Look for bergy bits.  Chop potatoes.  Look for bergy bits.

 My love of  history probably comes from trooping around old forts and battlegrounds with my family as a kid so you’re going to get a dose of it here.

 History oozes from the reddish rocks surrounding Red Bay, our first Labradorian landfall.  Andante sailed by them just like the Basques fisherman had over 400 years ago.  This was a much busier port then than it is now.  Between 1540 and 1610, Basque whaling activities made Red Bay the busiest whaling port in the world.  It’s a quiet place now and hard to imagine the harbor filled with thirty Basque galleons and over 2000 men working and living here. 

They came for the right whales that migrated up the Straits of Belle Isle, the natural constriction funneleing the whales to the harpoonists’ Shoreside operations rendered the whale oil, made barrels to hold it, and prepared it for shipping in the fall when the whole operation packed up and returned home.

 A storm swept through the harbor in the fall of 1565 and The San Juan, almost fully loaded with barrels of whale oil for the return voyage, was driven on the rocks and sank. All of the crew made it to shore and the ensuing lawsuits enabled modern researchers to learn of the sinking and begin searching.  Exactly 400 years later, she was discovered on the harbor bottom, laid open and flattened by time and ice like a cod filleted and laid open for salting. Through painstaking archeological work she was mapped, catalogued, and raised piece by piece.  Models were made of each piece and the originals were placed back on the harbor floor for preservation. 

 The exhibits do a great job giving a taste of what life was like for a Basque sailor of that era.  Laden with supplies including pre-fab wooden barrels, the Basque galleons left in the early spring. Sometimes arriving in these waters to find ice holding firm to the land, they set up operations. Whales were dragged as close to land as possible where blubber boiled in large tryworks.  Barrels were assembled close by the men protected from the elements by roofs made of red tiles from home. 

 At 5 ft. 6” and 145 pounds on average, they were a short, muscular group of men.  No evidence of women has been found. They worked hard, long days falling into exhausted sleep aboard their ships.  Accidents claimed lives and at least one winter, 1576-1577, men were left.  It was a  hard winter and when the galleons returned in the spring, many had died.  The first known will written in the new world was written that spring.  Juan Martinez de Larrume dictated his last will and testament. Some interesting pieces:

-14 items, the vast majority of references in the will, were related to church donations to cover low and high masses

-money was ear marked to cover a hospital debt

-money was also paid to cover a debt he owed for a cask of whale oil-turns out he’d bought the whale oil for a friend who now owed him for it.  “I declare that the caulker owes me four reales.  I ask that they be collected.”

 Roots of instruments we use today were found in the wreckage; a compass and hourglass to measure time and parts of an astrolabe (an early sextant) speak to the navigator’s art. 

 A not so welcome passenger to the new world was a rat.  His skeleton, found in the San Juan’s wreckage, marks the first dateable evidence of this invasive species to the new world. 

 

Books, books & more books

We've been reading up on Newfoundland/Labrador in anticipation of our trip.  There's a sidebar on the lower left that lists books on our shelves and if we've read them, gives our two cents worth of opinion on them.  

Enjoy!