Joseph Berkovitz

Hi Amy - the water temperature is 66 F at Boston buoy right now. Tomorrow we will go over ways you can get this information yourself. 

You should wear synthetic-fiber clothing that dries quickly and protects you from the sun, it should be something that you would be comfortable swimming in. Also bring a wind/water proof jacket in case of a breeze, like a rain shell. We will likely get a bit wet at the very beginning of the session to make sure everyone’s comfortable - 65 isn’t very cold water! I will be wearing athletic shorts and a couple of polypropylene layers. But tastes vary. Feel free to private message me if you have further questions. 

do you have a spray skirt? 

Hi Doug,

You did register for tomorrows nahant paddle if that is what you were asking, and we have a group of 6 at this point. We do not need a full group of 8, that’s just the limit. 

I normally send a confirmation and float plan the night before. 

I am not sure I understood your question. Did I answer it?

I don’t mind people posting alternative trips in other states so long as I can do the same to them ?

more = merrier

I’m traveling without laptop, hence this will be an abbreviated post with more information to be supplied late Monday night. 

A lunch paddle is indeed planned for Wednesday launching from Nahant Boat Ramp (unlike the beach, it is free parking) and going around the tip of Nahant to land at East Point for lunch and maybe a hike to the top of the peninsula for a view. Directions to the ramp: https://maps.app.goo.gl/e1gLFiEJAGRb9sm78?g_st=ic

This paddle is about 8 nm round trip. The waters at the tip of nahant are exposed Atlantic ocean but we will not be landing there. For what it’s worth the forecast is for benign conditions and you can avoid all the rocks if you wish. If you don’t wish, please bring a helmet.  

The meeting time will be 9:00 with the aim of launching by 9:30 (please don’t complain about the launch time unless you happen to control the tides).

trip is limited to 8 paddlers. please register at: https://forms.gle/s4zQAiLLeEWHng646

I will follow up with more information once I am home. As per the usual there are requirements for basic gear, dress for immersion and seaworthy boats with static lines and bulkheads.  please see another Wed. Lunch Paddle post for details. 

Thanks Gary for making prompt use of this new site and telling us about it! Very useful information about a spot that’s going to be super valuable to others visiting this area. There really is no other campsite that affords such easy access to the cool features to the south and east - the Gt Wass headlands, Crumple, Roque, The Brothers, Halifax... I can’t wait to camp there myself! 

My wife has relatives in Tobermory at the edge of Georgian Bay. I haven’t paddled there yet but we have visited them a couple of times, and I want to take a kayak up there. It’s an incredible landscape and waterscape.

The water in Georgian Bay is also a crazy bright blue color for some reason. It’s Caribbean in hue, but certainly not in temperature. 

Due to a trip West and a preceding time crunch, I will be taking the next 2 weeks off from organizing the WLP - i.e., 8/9/23 and 8/16/23. I plan to organize one on 8/23/23.

In the meantime, others are welcome to step in as per the usual!

 

People: David Silberman, Devon Winkler, Prudence Baxter, Ricardo Caivano, Bill Voss, Karen Gladstone, Phil Morrow, Joe Berkovitz

Route: Rockport Granite Pier, Straitsmouth Gap, Loblolly Cove, Thacher Island (return)

Launch: 10:00; Land: 15:00

This was a lovely and sunny summer paddle. It began with some slightly bouncy conditions just after the launch, probably left over from the overnight northerly wind that was dropping even as we paddled. Passing through Straitsmouth Gap the water evened out quite a bit and we enjoyed touring and in some cases playing around the ledges. There was a persistent long swell providing a bit of energy for those who wanted it. As the day continued, the wind picked up a bit and the waves seemed to diminish.

We all circumnavigated Thacher—the tourist boat tied up the ramp for a while—and the outside was, as usual, a lot more dynamic. High water was around 12.45 so many ledges and rocks were covered up by this point. so only Ricardo, Phil and Devon landed. (Note: we had called the island keeper in advance, which they now request for groups larger than 6.)

This was David's first open-ocean trip with NSPN and he acclimated quickly to the sea state, which at the outset provided some bumps and bounces. I hope I'm not going out on too much of a limb to say that the trip was a success from his point of view!

Here are some pictures Devon and Ricardo took of their Thacher visit on foot:

The 8/2/2023 edition of the Wednesday Lunch Paddle will launch from Rockport Granite Pier. Let's meet there at 9:30 am with the aim of launching at 10 am. We will likely head south and visit Straitsmouth, and Thacher Islands or Loblolly Cove. High water is around 12:45 pm which is ideal for landing at any of these locations. The exact plan won't be decided until right before we launch and will depend on the group and the conditions.  A potential trip mileage is somewhere in the region of 8+ NM but there are many options to shorten and extend. As of press time, it looks to be a very calm and beautiful day offering a scenic experience rather than a challenge. But that could always change!

Charts, tides, forecasts, some possible destinations can be found at this Floating Trails link. The current NOAA forecast is for continuing cool, dry weather: N wind 6 to 8 kt becoming E in the afternoon. Sunny. Seas around 1 ft.

Rockport Granite Pier apparently has restored its dedicated kayak launch ramp (which has been defunct as long as I've been paddling there), so I plan on getting there a little earlier to figure out how this works. Boats and gear will  still have to be dropped off before parking on the upper level of the pier, but exactly where the best drop-off point is, I will figure out when I get there -- or maybe someone can post known details about the kayak ramp on this thread.

Parking costs $12 cash. Inconvenient number, isn't it?  Also, if we land on Thacher it will cost $5 so please bring this amount too in case we do that.

This trip is now full; you can get on the wait list here: https://forms.gle/cmLSP3KxEK8YcgBe8

As always, WLP trips are flexible and tailored to meet the interests and abilities of the group on any given day.

To join the trip you must be a paid-up NSPN member, and have signed the club participant waiver for this season. Your signup information will only be shared with other members on the trip.

Trip level: WLPs do not have a specific level. All properly equipped members are welcome: please bring boats with rigged deck lines, bulkheads, spray skirts, and dress for immersion. 

NOTE: The Wednesday Lunch Paddles are cooperative adventures, not guided trips. We encourage paddlers to make their own independent decision about their comfort level with conditions and plans at the time of the paddle. Each participant is responsible for her/his own safety. Don’t assume the trip initiators are smarter, stronger, better at rough water, more attractive, or more skilled paddlers than you are. For more information, see this description of our trip philosophy from the NSPN web site. 

Please PM me if you have questions or if you haven’t paddled on one of these events before.

Hope to see you there!

Joe Berkovitz

I can share two approaches to this problem. Neither of them involve removable foot pegs, which sounds mechanically hard to deal with and as you say there aren’t stock parts for it. Also who wants to reconfigure their boat back and forth? Better to get used to one setup and get good at paddling it.

1. I had my front bulkhead moved rearwards by some 7 inches or so. This means that the cockpit is smaller and I now only need a very thin foam pad in front of the new bulkhead for my feet to rest on. But I got a huge increase in my front hatch from the freed up space. Big storage win and my cockpit experience is unaltered. I love it. Cost was several hundred dollars.
 

2. some people install a sturdy plate to go across the boat at ball-of-foot height where the pegs would be (with no foam pads behind this plate) . This has some of the same comfort and foot-freedom as a foam pad rig, but you can slide stuff underneath the cross plate to occupy the space in front of it. The plate needs to be made to measure but it isn’t complicated. 

The Graves as seen from Nahant (site of an upcoming paddle TBA):

Just dropping a note here to thank @mattdrayerfor a terrific surfski session with me on Friday (7/28). I've been wanting to do this since last year but the scheduling never seemed to work out.

Conditions were perfect in Nahant Bay for working on basic surfski technique, which was exactly what I wanted to do. Matt gave me some very effective feedback on using the wing paddle to best effect and discussed some training techniques with me. I found the Epic V8 a great ski to get started on and quite stable once it is moving. Unfortunately there were not really any waves to ride, so I will just have to do this again soon on a day when there is a bit of swell!

I recommend taking advantage of Matt's generosity if you can. Even if you do not run out and buy a ski, there are aspects of paddling that are revealed more clearly by being on one, and there is some useful learning that you can take back and apply to your sea kayak. And, of course, it's just plain fun!

J

People: Joyce Carpenter, Ricardo Caivano, Joe Berkovitz

Route:

(Click this link to view route on Floating Trails)

The forecast was for light winds, seas < 1 ft, sun and air temps around 80 with tolerable humidity. Low water was between 11:30 and 12 noon giving us a favorable ebb current out of the harbor and flood on the return trip. This made it a perfect day to get out to the outermost reaches of the harbor islands. We all wanted to visit Graves Light and set out accordingly, just after 9:30.

Our plan was to cross the North and South branches of Broad Sound Channel separately on our way out. This is a nice route that provides excellent visibility for traffic in all directions, and avoids the fast boats going through The Narrows or Nubble Channel like the P-town and South Shore ferries. This day, not many other boats were out there. Once we got past the subdued tide race over the bar out to Deer Island Light, the water became very calm. Whenever we were near a buoy we could see that the water was helping us paddle outward at a good clip.

Passing Green Island, we reached The Graves a bit after 11. We had hoped the owner might be there, coming outside with a cheery wave to offer us a beer and a tour of the plush digs inside,  but our fantasy was not to be: the place was deserted. We landed on the rocks near dead low—the calm conditions making it easy although a bit fiddly—and took a quick look around. 

The Graves is one of the most distant places in the Outer Harbor. It's over 8 nm from downtown Boston, 3.5 nm from Nahant, and 3.5 nm from Hull. There's a feeling of great remove from everything to do with the mainland. If you are the owner of the Graves, relaxing in the oil house with your mug of coffee in the morning, you may feel temporarily untouched by the cares of the world. I want to ask some time about how it feels, if I get the chance. I would also like to be able to ask my wife, as he did, "Hey, can we buy a lighthouse?" and hear her answer, "Sure."

The ocean feels really different out there. I don't mean "feels" in an impressionistic sense—I mean it feels different in a direct, physical way, as experienced through your boat and your paddle. The long swells rise up and swoop gracefully through the channels between the ledges, a solemn oscillation that seems to come from nowhere. On a calm day, there may be no waves visible on the surface of the ocean, and yet the water moves around the rocks in its muscular, purposeful way. We slowly explored the channels and slots, letting the water push us around, and then moved on.

Our next stop was a small cove on Outer Brewster Island. Here there were many seabirds and a view to the north. We sheltered next to a basalt cliff in a sliver of shade from the blasting sun, eating our lunch and watching the birds and looking out at the distant islands. It was perfect in every way. Thankfully, we did not have to buy the island to experience this.

From here we threaded our way back to Deer Island Winthrop via Middle Brewster and Calf and then the channel crossings again. On the way back from Calf, two large seals began to follow me as I paddled behind the others (I think they were gray seals, because they looked big and had those elephantine faces). It was a bit spooky and they were very close by, breathing heavily. The breathing would stop and I would feel some relief before suddenly they would surface again, Ricardo and Joyce excitedly pointing behind me at my pursuers. I sped up in the hope that they would pay more attention to one of the other paddlers, or just give up.

Our final leg around Deer Island's tip was actually a little choppy as a south wind was building a bit, interacting with the flood. It wasn't a lot of wind, except in comparison to the calm of the rest of the day. We landed at Winthrop after nearly 14 nm of paddling, tired and satisfied. Thank you Ricardo and Joyce for a wonderful day on the water!

On Wed. July 26 we're launching a lunch paddle at Winthrop Boat Launch with the aim of getting out to the Outer Harbor Islands paradise. The tides are ideal with the ebb ending just before noon.

This trip will start on the early side to better mesh with the tide levels and the favorable currents. Let's meet up at 9 am with an aim to launch (butts in boats) around 9:30 am.

Charts, tides, forecasts, some possible routes can be found at this Floating Trails link. The picture as of press time is: W wind 7 to 9 kt becoming SSW in the afternoon. Sunny. Seas around 1 ft.

Please register here: https://forms.gle/Q6D8j5RBwWAjsXj39

As always, WLP trips are flexible and tailored to meet the interests and abilities of the group on any given day. This trip does include a couple of notable features though:

- A total distance of at least 9-10 nm. You should be comfortable with a trip of this length.

- Crossing of a major navigation channel (President Roads). I typically break this up into two manageable pieces that are brief, have good visibility for boat traffic and are well-marked with buoys.

To join the trip you must be a paid-up NSPN member, and have signed the club participant waiver for this season. Your signup information will only be shared with other members on the trip.

Trip level: WLPs do not have a specific level. All properly equipped members are welcome: please bring boats with rigged deck lines, bulkheads, spray skirts, and dress for immersion. 

NOTE: The Wednesday Lunch Paddles are cooperative adventures, not guided trips. We encourage paddlers to make their own independent decision about their comfort level with conditions and plans at the time of the paddle. Each participant is responsible for her/his own safety. Don’t assume the trip initiators are smarter, stronger, better at rough water, more attractive, or more skilled paddlers than you are. For more information, see this description of our trip philosophy from the NSPN web site. 

Please PM me if you have questions or if you haven’t paddled on one of these events before.

Hope to see you there!

Joe Berkovitz

Kate, thank you for the kind words! Your own reports set a high standard, and David and I read and reread them a number of times. 

I hope we will all (you included) make it back there. 70? Pshaw!

PS ice seems to be readily available next to the Northern Peninsula every spring. 

This year the colony on Children’s has gone virtually missing. I visit every year and this is the first time I have not observed ibis, herons and egrets. Only gulls. 

Here is a google photos album with the complete set of pix and videos from the trip in case folks want to enjoy.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/MTjH2abgGcTzArdR7

and a recent video of the huge tabular iceberg that we visited breaking up:

https://m.facebook.com/groups/81949647728/permalink/10163277920387729/

"General tips about tides and winds" to paddle to any location at all, involves a lot of knowledge that is hard to put into a quick reply on a message board. Also there is more to think about than tides and winds: sea state, currents, boat traffic, which route to take, launching and landing locations... all of which goes under the broad heading of coastal navigation.  Note that the different areas of Thacher's shoreline offer vastly different paddling experiences depending on the conditions.

It's tempting to try and summarize all the things you need to think about, but it's much harder to summarize how to pull a plan out of all that information. So instead, I'll offer to help you plan a specific trip. I am sure many others at NSPN could help in the same way. I think that would be a good way for you to learn more about the process and about Thacher too.

That said, one conservative answer to your question is this: launch from Rockport Granite Pier on a super calm day with little or no swell, stay on the inside of Straitsmouth Island, and land on the Thacher tourist boat ramp on a day when the boat is not running (since it also uses the ramp which is tiny). Plan your landing on the island for high tide, because the lower part of the wooden ramp is extremely slippery. Bring $5 for the landing fee.

If you do want to study a deeper background on trip planning, Bob Levine and I wrote a document for the club that covers much of it. You can find it here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uY8i2L7OdBwiPnkAHmg8nguez-INWV6twn5kXLqKZ3k/edit
 

 

Thanks for letting me know, Barb

 

They were not on the calendar for a while so some people thought they had stopped, but I will correct the text!

WLPs are continuing! This one is for Wednesday July 19, and the plan is to explore one of our North Shore tidewaters: the Danvers River and its tributaries, a strange in-between space that includes salt water, parks, marinas, houses, light industry, the odd shopping mall and, of course, our local signature highway Route 128.  We're going to launch from Winter Island Park in Salem which requires a $10 parking fee. More specific details will be supplied to participants.

This trip will start later than usual to take advantage of 1:30 pm high water and avoid launching in mud/rocks. Let's meet up at 10:30 am with an aim to launch (butts in boats) around 11:00 am. The NOAA weather forecast as of right now is: W wind 5 to 7 kt becoming SSW in the afternoon. Mostly sunny. Seas 1 to 2 ft. Air temp 75-80 F.

Trip is now full. Get on the wait list with this form: https://forms.gle/XwVQHVhkn5piH88J7

As always, WLP trips are flexible and tailored to meet the interests and abilities of the group on any given day. However this one is not likely to be very demanding given the protected location: watching out for other boats will probably be the biggest challenge.

To join the trip you must be a paid-up NSPN member, and have signed the club participant waiver for this season. Your signup information will only be shared with other members on the trip.

Trip level: WLPs do not have a specific level. All properly equipped members are welcome: please bring boats with rigged deck lines, bulkheads, spray skirts, and dress for immersion. 

NOTE: The Wednesday Lunch Paddles are cooperative adventures, not guided trips. We encourage paddlers to make their own independent decision about their comfort level with conditions and plans at the time of the paddle. Each participant is responsible for her/his own safety. Don’t assume the trip initiators are smarter, stronger, better at rough water, more attractive, or more skilled paddlers than you are. For more information, see this description of our trip philosophy from the NSPN web site. 

Please PM me if you have questions or if you haven’t paddled on one of these events before.

Hope to see you there!

Joe Berkovitz

As much as I love rolling, there are a lot of interesting aspects of the trip; perhaps let's have another thread on the rotational aspects of Newfoundland if we want to pursue further. I'll try to respond though for others who may undertake a trip like this.

I practiced plenty before the trip including both loaded boats and winter water. I know others in the group practiced too. There were OTW discussions  during the trip about the wisdom of having assisters deal with fully loaded boats (80+ lb.) in the event of a failed roll. We had one paddler with a patched drysuit sleeve. Overall, the downside seemed greater to the group than the upside.

The bad cold is to me a more interesting question. Scratching the trip in the middle of it was certainly possible at one of the 3 road-accessible bailouts (Conche, Croque and Grandois). It would have been both expensive and heartbreaking. We chose to paddle on, and were glad we did!

What a great sounding trip, Ricardo! It sounds perfect.

@billvosssee the end of part 2 for some upside-down celebrating kayakers. At no point did anyone capsize, nor did any of us practice rolling in the cold water. Most of us had a bad cold throughout the trip.

Day 5: Interlude

I awoke suddenly very grateful for a day of relative inactivity. The valley in which we camped was bordered by coastal hills on the south side and a low ridge on the north side. The latter ridge blocked our view of the nearby outport of Grandois. (Another interesting place name, originally in French as “Grandes Oises” or big geese. Today it is spelled as “Grandois”, while pronounced by locals as “Grand-Zwah”. Quirkily, the Newfoundlanders conserved one of the original letter S’s in speech, and a different one in writing. In any case, we did not see geese there.)

I visited a pair of tiny overgrown family cemeteries nearby. One was from the 1800s, another from the mid-1900s; both sets of gravestones were in surprisingly good repair. The family names seemed very Irish, matching the cadence of the local dialect.

A caribou was sighted on a nearby hill. After breakfast, some of us hiked to the end of the harbor, past a little waterfall. We found a set of ponds above the harbor and draining into it via a sequence of brackish ponds, visible from a high patch of mossy ground that could also be a nice campsite. On the way back, we bushwhacked through a narrow gap in the coastal hills to reach gorgeous, deserted Howardin Cove on the outside, with its own gem of a pocket beach. However, that beach sported a large berm and a lot of seaweed scattered well above the strand line. We guessed it might be a rough place to land sometimes.

Phil found a huge rusty French nail. There are a lot of old artifacts lying around but they are not obvious.

(A note on bushwhacking in the brush: we did not see any ticks our entire time in Newfoundland. Cursory internet research suggests that there are very few in the province, although there may be some that passively migrate there via birds. We did check ourselves!)

As the day progressed, we had constant periods of heat and sun alternating with fog and cold rain. Finding comfortable clothing for the weather was a challenge.

Right before dinner, Lorrie spotted something strange in the water: a pair of antlered heads with no apparent bodies, moving steadily in our direction. Two caribou were swimming right across the river towards us, very near the hut. We watched in amazed silence as they shook their heads (getting rid of flies?), emerged from the water, and walked calmly up the hill.

Day 6: St. Julien to Fischot Island

Decision Time

This day opened a bit warmer and with some partial sun. It seemed that the heavy rain was over for now. The forecast, thanks to a cell signal that mysteriously persisted almost everywhere we went, was once again for southwest winds, 10-15 knots. This coastal zone forecast, as we knew by now, was often an overestimate. The Windy.com forecasts of 8-10 knots seemed more in the ballpark of reality for the strip of coast we were paddling in.

However we did note that a weather change was pending for Day 8 of our trip, which had been planned to end on Day 9. This change would bring a low pressure system, strong northerly winds, an air temperature drop into the 40s, and more heavy rain. The wind direction would bring cold, blustery weather and rough water to the Atlantic coast. Inside Hare Bay where our next (and very exposed) campsite lay, we could expect wind waves with a substantial fetch to the north.

With this information in hand, we considered whether to cut our trip short by one day. Even with the day off we had kept to a fast schedule and had some distance in the bank. We could end the trip a day early, without sacrificing any major goals or missing any coastline. So we all agreed that we should a) finish the trip one day earlier than planned to avoid camping in much colder and wetter conditions, and b) try to camp somewhere more protected than the exposed, open north-facing location that had been originally selected (MacGray Island).  The latter decision, if we followed it, would make for a long Day 7.

Our next move, regardless, was to paddle out to our next campsite on Fischot Island, a deserted outport and the only island on our trip that required a real crossing. In my mind as I reviewed the few pictures I’d seen, Fischot was a flat, grassy, windswept place. I wondered how it would be as a camping spot.

Encounter On The Water

The next stretch from St Julien to Jehenne Point was uneventful, with a quick bathroom stop at Trompeuse Bay which features a sheltered beach. There were some very interesting looking coves along the way, but we felt the need to keep going. We crossed the mouth of Great Islets Harbour and navigated to what we thought should be a “tickle” leading to a protected bay that would make a good lunch spot. In Newfoundland English a tickle is defined as, “A narrow salt-water strait, as in an entrance to a harbour or between islands or other land masses, often difficult or treacherous to navigate because of narrowness, tides, etc; a ‘settlement’ adjoining such a passage.” This one qualified as difficult to navigate because it was about 6 inches shy of having any water in it at all, the tide cycle being near dead low. We headed outside English Island in what were becoming rather rough conditions; this was the Fischot Channel, a spot where the Labrador Current may be squeezed and sped up, opposing a southwest wind. We ducked back into a protected cove from the north, where we stopped for a much-needed lunch. Here, we munched as we watched caribou grazing on the other side of the deeply embayed island. They presumably swim to reach wherever there is food.

Our postprandial crossing to Fischot Island was not as rough as what we’d seen so far. The largest herd of caribou we’d seen so far was grazing on the island, whose hills seemed much higher and more dramatic than my mental image of the place. We pondered the sights, aware that our next move would be to find our way into the protected interior waters of the island through one of the three narrow channels that afford access.

Before we could ponder much, though, we had our first encounter with another boat on the water! Until this moment, we had not seen a single one; the boats always turned out on closer inspection to be icebergs.

This boat was captained by Justin Boyd, at once the local owner of Crazy Ray’s Boat Tours, the son of the proprietor of the hunting lodge where we’d be staying next, and the organizer of our vehicle shuttle. His 5 passengers included Kathleen Blanchard, president of a non-profit called Intervale, a local friend of Kathleen’s, and 3 young women engaged in wildlife research as part of a program connected with Intervale. They were all very excited to see other humans out there in the middle of nowhere. (Except for Justin, who knew we would be in the area; David and I had already had a Zoom call with him to pick up local knowledge. Justin did seem pleased that we were still alive.)

At one point, one of the women said, “You’re real mariners!” True or false, this was quite thrilling to me. As this could be the only time I will ever hear that compliment, I fully intend to savor it.

Fischot: The Inside-Out Island

Our encounter with fellow humanity had to come to an end, and we proceeded to miss the main entrance to Fischot Harbour and enter via an incredibly shallow channel just to its east. Eventually we reached the interior of the island, an otherworldly landscape for which Janet coined the phrase, “the inside-out island”.

Fischot Island is indeed turned inside-out. Together with its sisters Northeast and Frommy Island, its calm and wide harbor is circled by heather hills on all sides, with three narrow channels leading to the ocean outside. The harbor is half a mile wide from north to south, and a quarter-mile wide from west to east. In some spots, abandoned buildings lean and loom in a Gothic fashion. The weather was not gloomy, fortunately: it was warm and sunny. Gravel beaches lined most of the harbor, which has various sinuous arms going here and there. We found our way to the middle of one of these arms, next to a narrow strip of land that seemed ideal for a row of tents while letting us walk to the rest of the island. 

Nearby was the skeleton of a caribou, its antlers entangled in a large pile of fishing gear. The basic storyline seemed obvious, and sad. When we told some local fishermen about it later, they confirmed that the gear seemed likely to be the reason for the animal’s demise.

After pitching camp, we walked to the nearby eastern exit from the harbor, our most likely egress. There was a huge iceberg visible just outside and to the north of this channel. Then we walked all the way around the harbor to the abandoned fragments of a village on the west side, following game trails and trying to avoid muddy sumps.

Many caribou wandered freely, a number of them hanging out near an elevated freshwater pond. 

Janet, Jason and I split off from Phil and Lorrie to walk the long way back to our tents via the ridgeline of the surrounding hills. The panoramic views of the entire area and the sounds of the surf were stunning. The picture below looks southwest towards St. Julien Island from which we had come; its headland is visible on the left.

At some point, we heard a series of very loud booming sounds from the east. We wondered what was happening to our iceberg neighbor. Tomorrow would tell.

Day 7: Fischot Island to Louisa Island

Puffin City

Our final full day of paddling awaited us. We had a choice in front of us: whether to take an excursion north along the island chain, to visit a puffin colony at the mouth of Hare Bay on Great Cormorandier Island (or, in laconic local parlance, “North Island”). This would extend our final full-day paddle by 4 to 5 nm, and we were trying to reach a distant protected campsite that would not be exposed to the next morning’s expected north wind, for a total of nearly 18 nm. Another protected option was much closer, but would push more paddling into the final day and potentially rougher conditions.

Eventually we opted to take the island-chain puffin tour, provided that we had visibility to do so. As there was a lot of fog inside Fischot Harbour, it was not clear we would be able to see anything. First, we exited the eastern channel where swell was standing up slightly against a modest ebb. Our iceberg was no longer where it had been. It was clear that we would be able to see enough to enjoy our tour of the island chain, and so we set off. This was a good thing, because the journey was one of the bigger spectacles of the whole trip.

The islands jutting north into the entrance to Hare Bay are very wild-looking. As we entered this visual world laced with fog, we encountered large remnants of the formerly nearby iceberg. These remnants were not small. It must have broken up in a dramatic way.

We made our way past Northeast Island, Little Verdon, Great Verdon, and finally tiny Pigeon Island to reach the cliffy heights of North (Great Cormorandier) Island. As we approached, puffins became visible, flitting through the air around us. On the cliffs facing out to Pigeon was a large pile of collapsed boulders. This was at least one of the puffin colonies; puffins roosted on it everywhere, and were flying in clouds over us with their stubby little bat-like wings.

Having had our fill of puffin viewing, we continued to round the east side of the island. Guillemots darted out from the towering cliffs, along with terns, gulls and additional bunches of puffins. The scenery was huge, accentuated by the occasional substantial swell rolling in. Little Coromandier Island loomed up ahead. Eventually we paddled through a narrow gut on the northeast corner of North island, helped by a wave or two. Over here we were on the lee side, relatively protected until we pulled out into the channel for the longish crossing back. An hour’s paddle via two conveniently placed islets returned us to Tortoise Hill on the main island of Newfoundland. Around this time, what had been somewhat rough waters on the outside and in Fischot Channel, transitioned to calm. We could see the whole island chain from a distance, fog tendrils threading through it, one of them lit up blue by a towering berg. Occasional crashes and booms came from that direction.

Hare Bay

The remainder of our long paddle including a lunch stop in Starboard Cove took place in warmer waters, along the shore. My guess is that the water temperature here was in the 50s instead of the low 40s. Hare Bay is out of the way of the Labrador Current, and apparently it has a very different marine environment. Just before our lunch stop, we encountered Justin Boyd and his research passengers again on their boat and said hello, conferring with Justin on some details of where we might stop for the night.

We stopped on MacGray Island to satisfy our curiosity about it as a camping spot. It was terribly nice with a perfect beach and meadow—but it was also very exposed, as we had expected.

We decided to press on to a protected area Justin had told us about, inside a branch of the bay named Shoal Arm. To reach it, we entered a channel called American Tickle (so named because it was allegedly dug or dredged by US troops at some point, or so the local story goes). Whoever may have done what to this channel, it was moving with a very swift current and we shot into Shoal Arm, looking for a campsite along our right as we believed we’d been told to do. We didn’t find a good site, but we did observe a couple of caribou browsing Shoal Arm Island at close range. Eventually we decided we would work our way to the south end of Louisa Island where I had marked a tentative camping spot, and where some kind of distant structure was visible. The structure turned out to be a duck blind, and there was indeed a good campsite just near it on a gravel bar. To get to it, we had to cross some narrow shoals up-current; fortunately someone had engineered a crude channel through the shoals just wide and deep enough to make it. If we had just hung out and waited for the water to rise, it would have been easier, although less fun.

Our final night of camping was damp and rain-soaked. Jason put up his tarp for the only time on the trip we really needed it. The area was very wet and wild iris were growing nearby.

The mosquitoes were incredibly fierce at this site; I woke up in the middle of the night and could hear hundreds of them droning in the space just outside my inner tent. I knew the trip was almost over, and for the first time in over a week, I felt officially Ready To Sleep In A Real Bed.

Day 8: Louisa Island to Main Brook

The north wind and rain finally began on this morning. As we exited our sheltered site between the islands, small wind waves began to percolate in from Hare Bay and the air became noticeably cooler. It was only a 3 nm paddle to the town of Main Brook where our vehicles would be waiting, so we didn’t give these conditions much of a thought.

We paddled along the stretch of waterfront leading to Main Brook, on our way to Justin Boyd’s dock. A woman opened her front door, waved at us all, and said, “Hello!” in a friendly way. Perhaps our fame had preceded us, and we were now local kayaking celebrities. But people in Newfoundland are very noticeably warm, generous and kind, and I think this was another expression of that character. It is really a very striking contrast to the New England persona.

At Justin’s dock, Lorrie and Janet undertook a victory roll (the only capsizes of the trip, and intentional at that).

From here, there was a lengthy unpacking and changing episode, and finally a drive down the road to our next place of residence: Tuckamore Lodge. They had been able to fit us in a day early with a game of musical rooms.

We did expect the basic comforts of civilization, but Tuckamore Lodge turned out to be so much more than that. Perhaps a little of it was the contrast with our rough living of the previous week, but it seemed to all of us like a fantasy of a plush hunting lodge: a huge log building, enormous kitchen and common room with cathedral ceilings and taxidermy everywhere, a heated drying room (!), and a very friendly and attentive staff. We couldn’t possibly have asked for more. Warm and dry at last:

We were all so grateful to David for this piece of perfect planning. That afternoon we FaceTimed with David to catch up with him and to tell him how much we missed him on this trip. We all hope we’ll get to go to Newfoundland again with him.

Tourist Day 1: L’Anse Aux Meadows

The next day, we had what amounted to an extra day off the water so we drove north as far as possible to L’anse aux Meadows. This site lies at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland on the Strait of Belle Isle, facing Labrador. It is the only attested Pre-columbian Norse settlement in North America (not counting Greenland). A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it includes ruins and several reconstructed earthen buildings from the settlement. The site lays claim to being the unique place where the European branch of Homo sapiens encountered the Asian/North American branch, each having crossed a different ocean to reach this point.

This place is very much worth visiting, even if (as was the case for us) it is windy, foggy and you can’t see more than a quarter mile. The museum and site are very informative and you really do get a sense of what it might have been like to be a Viking in this place 1,000 years ago. The  boardwalk trails through arctic bogs are also great.

My special treat this day was to work the bellows for an expert blacksmith who forged a nail from refined bog iron on the spot. (The iron ore was local to the site, although he explained that the  hardwood charcoal he used was not.) He gave me the nail as a gift, but only after abusing me because I did such a bad job with the bellows. I'll just say... it's trickier than it looks.

Tourist Day 2: The French Shore Interpretation Center

On our penultimate day in Newfoundland, we drove back to the town of Conche to visit the French Shore Interpretation Center, a unique local museum curated by Joan Simmons of Conche. For us, this was one of the highlights of the entire trip, including the paddling.

The Center has two main parts. One part is a conventional but very effective small museum, hosting a gallery of artifacts and explanatory posters presenting the history of the French Shore. The materials show the life of both the local people and the French through objects, text, maps and photographs. For us this helped us see the areas we had just visited through a different lens, understanding that today’s deserted French sites had hosted thriving seasonal fish factories only 150 years ago.

The other part of the Center is a very unusual one-of-a-kind object: the French Shore Tapestry (http://www.frenchshoretapestry.com/en/intro.asp). This 216-foot-long tapestry winds through an entire room of the center; it was created by French and Newfoundland artisans working together, and visually narrates both the history and surroundings of the area, beginning (why not?) with the creation of the world and continuing up to almost the present day. Joan was one of the half-dozen or so local women who helped create it. The artwork itself is powerful enough, but Joan’s compelling narration of every panel and every story turned it into a different kind of art, a hybrid of visual and verbal storytelling. We learned so very much from this experience about the place and the people we had been visiting. I will never be able to forget this.

Afterwards we visited the site of a post-WW II plane crash in Conche, an event that lives on in people's memories (as does the remains of the plane). Joan told us how she remembered the still-prominent furrows in the dirt in front of her school that had been made by the plane, and how the local fishermen were "always chopping at the plane" whenever they needed strips of metal to repair their boats.

That's all for this trip report. Newfoundland is magical. I think I'm correct when I say that we all hope to go back someday.