Not very impressive, is it? In fact, I feel rather cheated after going to all of this trouble to get here in the first place.
However, rolling Newfoundland fogs are a well-known phenomenon in the Gulf of St Lawrence as anyone who remembers my visit to that island in the Gulf of St Lawrence in May 2012 might well remember. And there have been enough marine accidents in the Gulf due to the rolling fog to underline the point, so it’s not really that unexpected.
I had a wild night last night anyway, here hemmed in between a couple of vehicles on the quayside in the shadow of the Apollo. It was as if the wind was trying to tear the roof of the Dodge.
I was up too at about 05:50 thanks to the alarm, due to the fact that the shipping company offices open at 06:00. The 08:00 sailing has been cancelled as expected but we had to report back at 09:00 for further news.
At 09:00 we were informed that there would be an unscheduled sailing at 10:30 so we all made our way to the docks where, using a rather large shoehorn, all of the waiting vehicles were squeezed on and off we went.
But the poor Apollo is looking rather worse for wear these days, a lot worse than she did in 2010. A good refit would do her the world of good, or perhaps there’s another redundant cross-channel ferry somewhere that needs a new home. The Apollo could then go to a nice retirement home in the sunshine somewhere in the Aegean, the usual abode of old and tired Ro-Ro ferries.
Despite the miserable weather, I made it down to Old Fort, or Vieux Fort as the authorities insist on calling it. This is the far end of Highway 138, and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we reached the other end of the road
in May 2012.
There’s just this gap of a couple of hundred miles in the road that will never be completed in the lifetime of anyone reading this rubbish.
Old Fort was discovered in 1504, officially that is, by Breton whalers who had some kind of whaling plant here similar to the one that we visited in Red Bay in 2010
But I say “officially” because there’s considerable evidence to suggest that places such as this were well-known long before they were officially “discovered”. The whalers and trappers who worked out of these places kept the locations of their enterprises secret so that the competition wouldn’t move in, but with Cabot’s voyage of “discovery” in 1497 (and it’s certain that Cabot knew what he was going to find), there was an impetus for the Breton and Basque whalers and the like to formally “discover” the locations of their enterprises in order to forestall the English.
And with that, I had a slow meander back to the harbour at Brador Bay which will be my location for tonight I reckon. I’m hoping that the weather might improve tomorrow because if we are still having the fog and the rain, I’ll have to postpone my voyage around the Trans-Labrador Highway until next year.
