Labrador
We spotted our first bergs after we left Port Saunders. Sculpted by wind and waves they continue to fascinate. Tempting as it is to go right up to them, we’ve been very cautious. With 80 to 90% of their mass underwater you have no idea when some internal clock will go off and the whole structure will tip. Enormous ones can turn turtle without any warming. The wave from that isn’t something we’d like to mess with much less a big chunk of it falling on us. The closest we’ve come to one was squeezing by a grounded, house sized one that was blocking our pass through a tickle.
Here's a photo album of some of these incredible icy bits:
Please leave a comment if you can't open the photo album. It should work . . .
August 28, 2009
Brentt’s Cove, Facheux Bay, Newfoundland
47°41.9N
056°20.3W
I’m messing with the blog reality here and jumping from surviving Hurricane Bill to current events . . .
We’ve made the ultimate cruising sin and booked flights home. Being at the mercy of wind and waves means you can say when you’ll be near land or which land you may be near but not both at the same time. This time an unavoidable work commitment meant we had to nail down the where and the when. Booking the flights for Halifax to Baltimore while sitting in a St. John’s coffee shop we never guessed the wind would blow out of the west, the direction we needed to go, for two solid weeks with a hurricane and a tropical depression included! Time’s running out to get the boat to a safe place to leave her and get ground transportation to Halifax. We sat in St. Pierre, a small island owned by France off the southern Newfoundland coast, and listened with sinking hearts to the forecast. West and Southwest winds dominated.
The strategy we came up with was head to the southwestern coast of Newfoundland and do short hops as far west as we can get until there’s a window to cross the more than 100 miles to Nova Scotia. The only problem, a gale forecast for Friday and then Hurricane Danny bearing down.
Normally the advantage of coastal cruising is you can pick your weather and not go out when it’s really nasty. But we’re seeing some longer ocean passages in our future where you’re out long enough that you can’t pick your weather. You deal with the weather as it comes. So it seemed like a good idea to get in a little practice.
The gale was blowing steady 35 knots and gusting to 40. Waves were averaging 12-15 feet with the occasional roller topping out at 20 feet and breaking. We’re judging wave height by how far up our mast the top was when we were in the trough!
Otto, our electric auto-pilot decided enough was enough and wouldn’t steer in those seas. So we hand steered doing hour turns at the tiller, doing our best to gain some ground westerly into the wind.
So what’s it like sailing upwind into an ocean gale? Get a friend to drive you around in a car. Get up to 40 miles an hour. Now stick your head out the window. That’s about 35 knots. Remember this sensation. Now, look at the room you’re in. Turn your head to a 35 degree angle. Bob your head up and down. Throw in a big bob every so often. Have your friend continually shove you around while you try to stay seated. That’s the motion of the boat. Get another friend to stand off to the side with a big bucket of very cold water. Now get 10 more friends with buckets to join him or her. Occasionally have them all throw their buckets at you at the same time. Add a lot of wind noise sound effects so you can’t hear your own voice. Getting the picture?
I did OK. It’s amazing how you can take anything when you know it’s going to end. If we were in a multiple day gale in the ocean . . . well what choice do you have but to suck it up. Russ also admitted he thought I might freak out a bit. I didn’t but confess that I didn’t enjoy looking at the waves coming towards us. It was one thing to see them downwind and leaving us but to see what was coming . . . nope.
We found a few leaks that we’ll fix and unfortunately a port that wasn’t closed all the way let in a lot of salt water but it’s all fixable. And for my birthday? Well, we're firmly anchored in a gorgeous fjord with a little more westing under our keel and I found out a little about what I can handle. Not a bad thing to do on your birthday.
So what did you do for your 44th birthday?
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!
July 12, 2009Murray’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.
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.
