Fun fact: The island of Newfoundland is home to zero snakes, zero ticks, and zero skunks. Like a dog, I do best when kept clear of this trio of critters, and that was reason enough for me to sail up and pay a visit. For my wife, Alex, the idea of sailing our 36-foot boat to Atlantic Canada sounded foreboding, damp, and unpleasantly un-tropical. In her mind, critters, or lack thereof, didn’t justify subjecting ourselves to such a rigorous coast.
More research was needed, so we set ourselves to reading. We learned about the history, climate, and geography of the place easily enough, and then we stumbled upon Canadian author Farley Mowat. His portrayal of life on Newfoundland and in the waters that surround it captivated us. The more we read, the more we knew we had to see this place with our own eyes. So we pointed our bow north last summer to explore the coast that Mowat wrote so fondly of and once called home. It would be our first literary pilgrimage under sail.
“Newfoundland remains a true sea-province, perhaps akin to that other lost sea-province called Atlantis,” Mowat writes, “but Newfoundland, instead of sinking into the green depths, was somehow blown adrift to fetch up against our shores, there to remain in unwilling exile, always straining back towards the east.”
Few write about “the hungry ocean” of the North Atlantic with the same reverence and awe as Mowat. The man was a sailor. The full fury of the sea screeches out of his pen in one line, and humorous tribulations with boat failures fill the next. The harbors, boats, and people who call Newfoundland home are keenly understood and shared across the page with fervor. There was no one better to guide us as we voyaged into those cold, unfamiliar Canadian waters than the Sage of Burgeo, the de facto magister navis of Newfoundland himself, Farley Mowat.
Mind The Sunkers
The Grey Seas Under, Mowat’s disquieting, nonfiction narrative about the arduous life of a Canadian salvage tug in the “Western Ocean” before and during WWII, confirmed Alex’s suspicion about the foreboding nature of the place. I kept that title from her for a bit, and at the same time prepared for the worst. We added immersion suits to our safety equipment, updated our float plan on our 406 devices, double-checked the expiration dates on our flares, purchased a few extra cans of soup, and headed north.
Sailing along the foggy Nova Scotia coast reminded us of Maine, until the hills gained elevation in Cape Breton and offered an intriguing hint of something new. Then we crossed the notorious Cabot Strait and made landfall on the bold, barren, and stunningly beautiful coast of Newfoundland.
“Poised like a mighty granite stopper over the bell-mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” as Mowat eloquently writes. It was a place unlike anything we had ever seen. We felt far away from home—like on the moon, far away from home—and knew that help could be hard to find if we were to need it.
I shared my concerns with a new friend in Francois about navigating his native Newfoundland waters. He shrugged them off and told me, “Ahh b’y, go easy on the screech and mind the sunkers and you’ll be fine.” The screech, a local high-test rum delicacy, I had already learned about. It was the “sunkers” that alarmed me. Mowat had made mention of them too, bemoaning the “dreadful explicitness” of their naming. A sunker, as I’ve come to learn, is an uncharted rock lurking dangerously just beneath the surface of the sea.
The Canadian Hydrographic Service charts didn’t instill much confidence. Some sections of the depicted coast had an antiquated look like what you might find in an old map shop, perhaps labeled, “Not For Navigational Use.” And yet here they were being offered up to me for navigational use. A note on the chart explained their limitations this way: “Mariners are advised to exercise caution. The area bounded by pecked line is a metric reproduction of a former U.S. Chart 2418, based on British Admiralty surveys conducted between 1860 and 1891 and is not surveyed to modern standards.”
Well, blow me down! Surely things on Navionics are better. They are not. I looked on my plotter and on my phone app and found the same feeble renditions. They looked about as helpful and reliable as a hand-drawn sketch by Admiral Nelson.
To add to the unease, aids to navigation are few and far between in Canada, and the ones provided are small, often off-station, and hard to find. Channels and harbor approaches are only hinted at or simply left unmarked altogether. And as Mowat points out, Newfoundland is “t’place where t’fog is made.”
As it worked out, we managed to skirt the sunkers and didn’t touch bottom once during our three months in Canada. Claire Mowat, Farley’s wife, put it this way in her book The Outport People: “Dan didn’t know where all the rocks were, he told us later on, but he knew where they weren’t.” That was the key; if we followed the obvious routes from place to place, we could be pretty sure that someone else would have found the rock first, and news of its existence would have been shared on the chart. Gunkholing off into the wilds is where the good hunting for the sunkers can still be found. We weren’t stalking that prize though, and we stayed clear of the regions marked by the pecked line.
There be Berries in Them Thar Hills
According to Farley Mowat, Newfoundlanders have a saying that a voyage badly begun will come to a good conclusion: “Bad beginning—good ending.” Adhering to that logic can be tricky business, but we managed to pull it off by heading straight to the hospital on day one in Newfoundland. Not only does the cold fog off the coast of Nova Scotia in June make you feel like you’re living inside a ping-pong ball for weeks on end, it can also induce a fever-spiking pneumonia in your crew’s lung. Fortunately, they had some good pills at the little hospital in Port aux Basque and we were back to full strength in short order.
Port aux Basque is a ferry port town and as such serves as Newfoundland’s main link to the outside world. The ferry itself is massive and what Mowat describes as a “monstrosity…about as kindly as an old goat with a sore udder; and just about as beautiful.” When the massive beast arrives, the whole harbor shudders violently in its wake. Fortunately, a quieter place to convalesce lies only 8 miles east near the awkwardly name Isle aux Morts. We were still within range of the hospital should we need to return, but we were also in a spectacular anchorage. Mickle’s Tickle, as it’s called, is surrounded by rolling hills of tundra dotted with small groves of stunted spruce trees.
We happened to arrive during peak bakeapple berry season. This cousin to the cloudberry can only be found in Newfoundland and Iceland and is known to produce a highly prized jam. Catching these berries is so profitable that during the harvest season, the local fishing fleet pivots from fish to berries.
We witnessed the process firsthand: A pair of small fishing boats would arrive in our anchorage every day and tie off to the bushes along the shore. Then the crew of two or three would hop off and wander the hills for a day of berry picking. You don’t see this practice often among the fishermen in New Bedford or Gloucester in my home state of Massachusetts, and it was made all the more startling thanks to an optical illusion: The dwarf spruce trees that lightly populate these hills, stunted by the vicious winter weather on this coast, stand only about 4 feet tall. But from a distance they appear to be normal spruces that would tower above a normal man. In Newfoundland, it is the berry-picking fishermen who tower above the stunted trees, and the effect makes the fishermen appear as giants.
Following their lead, I whiled away an afternoon bounding through the pleasantly snake-free, tick-free, skunk-free shire picking berries that I hoped would aid in my wife’s recovery to good health. The tundra was surprisingly dry and spongy and easy to walk on—even in Crocs. The western end of this coast is built of low, rolling hills broken up by many small islands and bays. Further east, the land gains elevation and towering fjords cut seductively inland. The land remains equally accessible from east to west and the hiking ashore is excellent most everywhere.
As we began our meandering east along the coast, we found more surprises. The Labrador Current and the ice water that it delivers from the North Pole was less of a problem than we had feared. Much of our chosen cruising grounds, including the coast of Cape Breton and the entire south coast of Newfoundland, lies to the west of this cold current and is instead washed by the warmer waters flooding out of the Saint Lawrence River. Ironically for us, the further north we got, the warmer it got.
After the chill of Nova Scotia in June, our days in Newfoundland in July and August were warmed by dry westerly winds that blew the fog away. The temperatures soared and felt about the same as Maine in the summer. And much like Maine, all the near-shore islands and bays made it easy to get out of the raw open sea and into warm, calm, and protected anchorages.
Inland swimming holes were plentiful, and the heads of the fjords and the back “tickles” of the bays were fed, often spectacularly, by cascading ponds, streams, and waterfalls from those warm inland waters. We swam more in Newfoundland than we had anywhere since departing the Bahamas in the spring—like the memorable afternoon back-float in Hare Bay after a long hike, staring up the 2,000-foot wall of the fjord, watching three different waterfalls thundering down.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the trip was our visit to the Sandbanks Provincial Park where the rocky coast took a break and was displaced by miles of sandy beaches wrinkled up into perfect crescents separated by high dunes covered in beach grass. The Mowats lived near here during their five years ashore in Burgeo and would walk their dog, Albert, along these beaches daily. The sun was warm, and people were swimming here too. It was a scene straight out of a Martha’s Vineyard summer tourist pamphlet with a few stunted spruce trees thrown in around the edges for Canadian charm.
A Caribou for a Bridesmaid
Mowat’s prized, hilarious book The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float plays out along the south coast of Newfoundland—the most remote part of the island. Few roads exist, and the only way to reach most of the outport villages that dot this coast is by boat or helicopter. “Tiny fishing villages clinging like cold treacle to the wave-battered cliffs of the great island,” is how Mowat describes these places.
The history of this region revolves around the rise and fall of the fishing industry that episodically had a foothold in these villages. Life was never easy for the people who lived there. “We don’t be takin’ nothin’ from the sea. We has to sneak up on what we wants and wiggle it away,” explains one resident quoted by Mowat. Then in the early 1990s the cod fishery collapsed and life got harder. People moved away to look for work elsewhere, and the human population dwindled with the fish population.
The Canadian government is eager to discontinue services to the outport villages and has a standing offer to pay outport citizens a sizable sum to abandon their property and relocate elsewhere. Once 90% of the residents in any given village vote in favor of taking the resettlement money, the government pays the people and then effectively shuts down the town by discontinuing ferry service, electricity service, water, education, and healthcare. Some towns have taken the deal and others have not.
The abandoned ghost towns are still reachable by a cruising boat like ours, and we sailed in and visited a few. Decay is on the march in these places, and the surrounding landscape is seeping in. It’s easy to see how in short order these villages will be dismantled by the harsh weather and simply swallowed up by the land. Mowat describes the remaining fleet in such places this way: “The vessels were so old and tired that piss-a-beds (the local name for dandelions) were sprouting from their decks, or they were taking a well-earned rest on the harbour bottom.”
In 2009, the 31 residents of Grand Bruit voted to accept resettlement and move away. Today, most of their empty houses still stand and caribou roam the footpaths between them. A series of cascading ponds in the hills above the village feed a brook that cuts between the buildings and falls forcefully into the harbor. This chute of white water is the only thing working in town, and its hauntingly beautiful rush provides the only noise. The steeple has blown off the church roof, but the church doors remain unlocked and operable. Inside, we found a guest book, signed and dated mostly by visiting sailors like ourselves. I also noted mention of a recent wedding. Perhaps a young couple “from away” was doing their part to topple the Wedding Industrial Complex and enjoy an abundance of privacy for their DIY nuptials in the middle of a summer cruise in the middle of nowhere.
A handful of former residents return from time to time to Grand Bruit, making the open water trip by private boat from where the road ends at Rose Blanche 20 miles to the west. They camp out in their old, and now dark, houses in the fair summer months. A solitary man greeted us warmly upon our arrival at the derelict pier and was eager to talk. We smiled back but could hardly understand a word he said. The language was ostensibly English, but flared with an Irish brogue and filled with local idioms that made it challenging to comprehend. (We did come to appreciate that the name of the province is pronounced with the emphasis on the final syllable. Remember it this way: UnderSTAND NewfoundLAND.)
It seemed like a lonely place for this man to be with just the caribou for company.
The residents in the settlements that remain show a tenacious dedication to their villages and to their unconnected way of life. When we visited the tiny settlement of Ramea, the wharfinger (Canadian term for harbormaster) rowed over to collect the minimal wharfage fee for the night. He could have come by foot because we were tied to the wharf, but he came by boat. He could have approached using the rather large boat’s modern outboard motor, but said motor was tilted up and he approached by oar. I’m a big rower myself, and I complimented his method. In reply he mumbled something about saving fuel. That made good sense to me: It was a calm afternoon and he wasn’t going far so why not row?
The House
After several summers of sailing the south coast of Newfoundland in a willful, obstreperous wreck of an old sailboat sardonically named Happy Adventure, Farley, his new bride, Claire, and their dog Albert decided to uproot themselves from their native Ontario and move permanently to Burgeo, Newfoundland. In The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float, Mowat describes the decision this way:
“During the succeeding four summers, Happy Adventure held me to a stalemate. My cry was ‘Westward Ho!’—and hers was, ‘Westward No!’ She would go east like a lamb, but west she would not go under any circumstances. After the second summer we all but gave up trying. We gradually settled into Burgeo ways and became, perforce, real outport residents. Memories of the mainland began to dim. We forgot how and why we came to Burgeo in the first place. We three sailed Happy Adventure along the coast—to the eastward—exploring the mighty fiords that split the rock face of the iron-bound seaboard…She gave us almost no troubles during these years. She did not sink a single time, and her leaks and other crotchets remained manageable. She was apparently content and, it must be admitted, so were we—until the spring of 1967.”
Alex and I eventually made our way to Burgeo too. Like any good sailing literary pilgrims, we naturally wanted to find the house that Farley, Claire, and Albert lived in during the five years they were residents of this town. From what I read, I understood the house to be white, to have a sign out front that inexplicably said “Cape Horn,” and for it to sit on a plot of land near Messers Cove. With our boat secured nearby, we headed out on foot in that direction.
The Mowats left town in 1967, and houses can be repainted a different color, and signs can be changed or removed, so we knew some local guidance would be helpful. Unfortunately, there is no Google-translate between regular-way English and Newfoundland-English, and we struggled to understand the directions we pried out of the people we met.
Everyone in town seemed to know of Farley Mowat, but the directions we received were not only difficult to discern but also seemed vague and conflicting. Then when people found out that we were originally from Boston, they lost interest in Mowat altogether and instead just wanted to talk Bruins hockey. We ended up suspecting that a red and sign-less house might have been where the Mowats lived years ago. But we also had a lingering suspicion that a brown house a couple of doors down could have been the spot. We snapped a photo of the red one and walked back towards our boat with an empty feeling of ambiguity. Additional reading led us to learn that Farley Mowat is not a favorite son of Burgeo, and there may have been a sinister motive beneath the vague directions we received during our search for his house.
A Whale Named Moby Joe
Alex and I departed Newfoundland with a perfect late-summer overnight sail to the Magdalen Islands in Quebec with Atlantic white-sided dolphins in our bow wave and gratitude thumping in our hearts. From there, we ultimately made it back to the tropics unscathed. The Mowats left Newfoundland by the same mode and sailed in the same direction years earlier, but the mood aboard their boat was decidedly different; morale on Happy Adventure in 1967 was low.
Farley was a lifelong advocate for animal rights. He was also a man who wasn’t afraid to speak out for what he believed in on any subject—a habit that regularly caused friction in small-town Burgeo. One February day in 1967 when a pregnant fin whale swam into Burgeo harbor and became stranded, the issue came to a head. Mowat writes: [The whale] “provided an irresistible target for the guns of a handful of Burgeo men until I interceded and stopped the shooting. Unhappily it stopped too late and the whale died of her wounds.”
Mowat had contacts in the press and his outrage over this incident quickly brought media attention from all around the world focusing in upon tiny Burgeo. The dead whale gained the nickname “Moby Joe” and the gunmen were vilified the world over. Mowat ultimately wrote a book about the incident entitled A Whale For The Killing. Many in Burgeo consider their depiction in the book to be slanderous, and that has cemented Mowat’s legacy in town to this day.
The rotting carcass of the whale was towed to a spot near Mowat’s house where it festered all of the summer of 1967. The stench was intolerable and tension in town was high. So Farley, Claire, and Albert unhappily packed themselves back aboard Happy Adventure, dropped lines, and forced her out to sea in a westerly direction, against her nature. And, just like that, Newfoundland was free of snakes, ticks, skunks…and Mowats.
’Twas a metaphorical sunker, you might say, and it made for a hard ending; something not all that uncommon in brutal and beautiful Newfoundland.
SAIL Contributing Editor Christopher Birch and his wife, Alex, are cruising aboard their 36-foot Morris Justine. Follow their voyage at eaglesevensailing.com.
May 2024
