July 16th – July 20th
Sunday was a travel day to Twillingate, a city, county, and area on the northern coast of central NL and confirmed to be a good place to see icebergs and whales, which it turned out was correct on both accounts. It was a long drive, 4 hours 30 minutes on GPS but the reality of it was closer to 6 hours with a lunch break and construction and traffic delays. There are no straight roads in 90% or more of Newfoundland and that adds time to any trip. We found our campground and as we are getting used to, there were no trees or shade other than whatever we brought with us or could make somehow. We were a short walk away from the water, a small horseshoe shaped cove with a short, crescent-shaped, rocky beach and small hills upon the headlands aside the cove and stretching out on to a small island with a car-accessible causeway and a small, restricted camping area.
With camp set up we walked down to check out the beach. Most of NL is 2-lane roads with no striping and not many street or traffic signs, but safe enough to walk on in small hamlets like this one we were staying in as there is very little traffic and usually only a car or two at a time. A couple hundred yards down the road forked and we took the left (south) fork and hiked up the hillock bordering the southwest side of the cove, an elevation of 15’ maybe, to another spectacular view of the ocean as sun slowly descended towards the horizon. We found a bench and saw another not far off along this same hillock. Our bench had something carved into it, a saying, “Long may your big jib draw,” which we, as honorary Newfi’landers knew to mean, “May your big sail draw wind,” or “May you have good fortune for a long time.” We did consider this to be our fortune in finding this bench not long after becoming Newfie’s. We had a sit and a long look at the beauty of the scene, returning to the camp before the light ran out.
Monday we tried walking into town, but we kept getting the directions wrong and the daytime traffic, once out of the area of our campsite, was heavier and at faster speeds and we gave up on walking into town. On the way back we did meet a local gentleman who told us whales had been sighted near Front Harbor, only a short distance away from us in Back Harbor. We decided to start the whale and iceberg hunt now rather than this afternoon, and away we went. Back Harbor was close to us and there were icebergs there, small ones, 3 total. We headed north to Crow’s Head, up near Long Point Lighthouse at the tip of North Twillingate Island, and the bigger, more interesting icebergs there, and whales, Minke whales my usual group of experts agreed.
We made a stop at the Long Point Lighthouse as it is uniquely shaped, it looks like a quart-sized milk bottle 50 feet tall. It is automated now, and a local conservancy runs the lighthouse’s tours, gift shop, etc. There was more whale activity here too and Mary saw breeching whales – but wasn’t able to get a picture. I had to take her word for it. From a stranger we heard there were more icebergs near Wild Cove, south of where we were now, on the east side of this island, not far away so we went. There were half a dozen smaller icebergs in this cove, of interesting and unusual shapes, the oddest being one that could be a soft-serve ice cream cone swirl, or a giant snail, or something akin to the Loch Ness monster. This area of Twillingate and down the east coast of NL to St John’s and beyond is known as “Iceberg Alley”. Icebergs regularly pass along these areas 1-2 years after calving off an ice sheet on or near Greenland and being propelled along the Labrador current, melting the whole time. Many are large enough to make it to St John’s before finally disappearing, some lasting long enough to reach the Atlantic to end there. The whales are going the other direction, north up the east coast of NL, feeding and summering in the North Atlantic waters.
We got many great pictures of whales surfacing and a couple ‘tail shots’ of a whale diving after surfacing and many shots of whales surfacing to catch a breath, showing the whole of their bodies and the small dorsal fin of the Minke whale. The shots are far off since we were on land but blowing them up confirms what we saw. Somewhere in all this excitement we ate lunch and dinner and returned to the campsite for the night.
Tuesday we hooked up with Benny and Karen again, who were staying nearby and took them to the places at Crow’s Nest, Long Point and Wild Cove for whale and iceberg watching. The large iceberg we had seen just the day before was greatly melted already. It had lost half its size leaving it with a large forward section and a smaller, pillar-like tail section, still connected by ice lost from the day before. The warming weather made short work of the mighty iceberg in only 24 hours. There were still whales in the area but not as plentiful or as close to shore as yesterday, but still close enough for good pictures.
The highlight of the day was the Twillingate Dinner-Theater in town. The show was Newfoundland and Labrador folk music with some Acadian and Irish/Gaelic folk thrown onto the mix, and some skits on life in Newfoundland. The shows emcee, band leader and multi-instrumentalist was Jody Hale, who also doubled as a dinner server and busboy before the theater part of the evening ensued, all the staff served two functions – serving before the show and then acting, singing, playing instruments in the show.
Jody was an incredible musician, playing guitar (6 and 12 string models), fiddle, banjo, Irish bouzouki, bodhran (Irish hand-drum), mandolin, accordion, and the ugly stick. The ugly stick is a NL invention, a stick (cane to staff sized) with a shoe or boot on the bottom, usually 4-6 nails in the stick just above the shoe/boot, each with 4-5 bottle caps that rattle together when the ugly stick is used and an ugly face of some kind adorning the top of the stick, The ugly player raps the stick on the ground, essentially using it to ‘foot-stomp’ to the music and add its own notes and tones to the music it is accompanying. The music was fabulous, and the skits were entertaining. Some skits were satires on NL traditions like getting a Moose license, making the traditional Christmas rum cake and mummery. Mummery is like caroling in the US, a group goes out and visits a neighbor, is taken into the home and they sing, the mummery and the people they are mumming with and the hosts then give them rum cake and often join the mummer group as it ventures to the next house and so on until there is a lot of drunken mummers chocking up somebody’s house. The other skits were a little cornier and the troupe had a hard time holding a straight face during some of the skits which made them all the more enjoyable.
Needless to say, we didn’t want to end when that time came. We did get to speak with Jody for a bit after the show on the various instruments he plays and how he got involved in the dinner-theater and learned to play so many instruments. We ended up buying his CD of traditional NL and Irish songs, including a couple he wrote and played in the revue, which were really good songs, simple yet heartful and with poignant lyrics that reach into your soul. He is a native of NL, from a tiny fishing village of 47 people. He moved away and then moved back after a few years because he missed the lifestyle and the people he knew the best. We took our leave and went back to camp to start prep work for travel on Wednesday to Gros Morne National Park on the western side of the Great Northern peninsula of NL.
