Marine Atlantic Ferry Company operates two car/passenger ferries each day between North Sydney, Nova Scotia, and Port-aux-Basque, Newfoundland. In winter, the ferry operates once each day. I took the once-daily 7-hour ferry in early December. It was an add on to a trip to Maine (a long add on from Maine) with two goals. Most importantly I had never been to Newfoundland so adding it to my life list was top priority. Secondly, the Cabot Strait through which the ferry travels was a well-known place to see Great Skua in winter.
Because it was winter the ferry was perhaps one-quarter full offering many chairs to sit in as we chugged northeast to Newfoundland. The weather that day was a tad rough. The sky was cloudless and the temperature was about +25 degrees F. The rough part was the relentless 40 mile per hour howling wind that rocked the ferry the moment we entered the open waters and it kept on rocking for nearly 7 hours until we arrived in Port-aux-Basque.
I stood (as much as you could stand) on the lee of the bow curled up behind a large pole that gave me some protection from the fierce wind. I was able to stay out in the elements for 15 minutes or so but then, despite being dressed in winter clothing including a wool face mask, I had to duck inside to regain some warmth.
Herring Gulls, Great Black-backed Gulls, and Iceland Gulls were plentiful and seemed to enjoy zooming around in the fierce wind probably not expending a single calorie while trying to get from point A to point B. Razorbills and Dovekie, both species of Alcid (cousins of the Puffin) flew by me like they were shot out of a cannon and finally after about 3 hours of mid-ocean torture, a large dark bird that looked more like a B-52 bomber than a cousin of the gulls, appeared on the horizon. Following it as closely as possible I was rewarded with it passing directly over the bow of the ferry maybe 50 feet from me. Had the wind not been so fierce I could have reached out and touched my first Great Skua!
We arrived in Port-aux-Basque about 7:00 p.m. Newfoundland time (its 30 minutes ahead of Nova Scotia and 90 minutes ahead of the east coast of the United States). There I ate a cod dinner (appropriate for Newfoundland) in a nearby restaurant and waited for the midnight return of the ferry to North Sydney.
Sometime during the 5 hours we spent on land in Newfoundland the storm system that was creating a ruckus on the ocean wore itself out and our return trip was almost glass calm. Sadly, I saw little of Newfoundland because my entire time there was in darkness. At least I saw a sign welcoming me to Newfoundland so I had a visual memory of my time there.
Fast forward to 2001. Continental Airlines had begun serving St. John’s Newfoundland with one flight a day from Newark, New Jersey. The flight was on a Canadian Regional Jet CRJ-900 that holds about 90 passengers. When I saw the advertisement for the new service (the air fare was $99 each way from Washington National airport via Newark!) I snared a ticket and pointed myself northeast.
This trip, like the first one, had two objectives. First I wanted to add the St. John’s airport to my list of airports landed at or taken off from. Second I wanted to visit Gros Morne National Park on the west side of the island. Gros Morne was reputed to have a healthy population of Rock Ptarmigan which I needed for my Canada bird list. Access to Gros Morne from St. John’s would require flying to Deer Lake (life airport) on Provincial Airlines (life airline). If everything fell into place I would add two new airports, a new airline, and make another checkmark on my growing Canada bird list.
Arrival in St. John’s was after dark so I saw little of the place other than the glaring lights of the airport and the entrance sign for my nearby hotel. The next morning, while waiting for the hotel van back to the airport for my flight to Deer Lake, I was overwhelmed by the songs and calls of Boreal Chickadees. They seemed to be everywhere and there seemed to be hundreds of them. Other than Common Raven, Boreal Chickadee was the only other bird I recorded before flying to Deer Lake.
Our flight to Deer Lake took about an hour to traverse the 246 miles of the middle of Newfoundland which to me looked like the Interior of Alaska. There was endless boreal forest, countless wetlands that I’m guessing no human ever paddled and a sense of wilderness that a day earlier was impossible to experience in Washington DC or Newark.
My quest for Rock Ptarmigan was successful – they were really numerous, and I fell in love with Gros Morne National Park quickly adding it to my list of places I need to return to one day.
Provincial Airlines deposited me safely back in St. John’s that evening and the next morning I drove to Cape Spear, geographically the easternmost point of land in North America protected as a National Historic Site by Parks Canada. The birdwatching was productive with many southbound seabirds and Common Eiders were so numerous on the ocean I felt like I could walk across their backs and not get my feet in salt water!
One week after my return from St. John’s and the beauty of Newfoundland, 19 crazed Islamic fundamentalists hijacked jets in Boston, Newark and Washington DC and turned the world upside down. We all remember how commercial air traffic in the United States was halted. This also included international flights that were not allowed to enter United States airspace.
One of the airports chosen for US-bound flights to be diverted was to Gander, Newfoundland, several hours north of St. John’s. At the time Gander had a human population of about 10,000 people. Air traffic control diverted enough flights to Gander that about 7,000 travelers descended on the tiny town. Residents of Gander responded to this crisis in typical Canadian fashion – they took care of everyone with no questions asked. People opened their homes to complete strangers who just a couple hours earlier were on an Alitalia jet from Rome. Makeshift shelters were set up and food was trucked in. The entire population of Gander went out of its way to take care of complete strangers and they did so for nearly a week until air travel could again resume.
Several months later George W. Bush made a prime-time speech to thank people for helping take care of Americans and others impacted by the flight diversions on September 11. Bush thanked Honduras for sending first aid supplies and he thanked Costa Rica for opening its airspace to South American flights being diverted as they traveled north. Bush did not once thank Canada for absorbing the bulk of the diverted travelers, for putting its military on alert to help out or for anything else. He especially did not thank the population of Gander, Newfoundland, that nearly doubled in a matter of hours and whose residents took care of Americans like they were long lost cousins.
This great injustice to Canadians in general and the Newfies in Gander happened about Christmas time 2001. Every year since then I have sent a letter of thanks to the mayor of Gander thanking him or her for what people did that day and again apologizing for George W. Bush and his refusal to thank the people who deserved it the most.
I will be making my third visit to Newfoundland arriving about 10:00 a.m. on July 9, 2024, when the Norwegian Star anchors in St. John’s harbor for 9 hours. Norwegian has only 4 excursions planned for Newfoundland’s capital and one of them, a trip to see Atlantic Puffins is already sold out. They have another one titled “The Galapagos of Geology” which sounds interesting but we were burned by a geology field trip a couple years ago in Argentina and are not going to try that again. Maybe instead I will rent a car near the cruise terminal and drive the 16 minutes (10 miles) to Cape Spear to photograph the entrance sign, to check for any icebergs, and find out if any cool seabirds have recently arrived.
Apologizing for W's mistakes could fill a lifetime.
ReplyDelete