Category Archives: argentia

Saturday 2nd September 2017 – I’VE HAD A COUPLE …

… of worse nights than I had last night I’m sure. But not many. Curled up on a reclining seat is not my idea of spending a night, and I ache in places that I didn’t even realise that I had places.

But that didn’t stop me going on a mega-ramble during the night. And I wasn’t on my own either. I started off with Alison but at some point I ended up with a young girl with very short ginger hair, and I’m not sure when the changeover took place. We were in a hotel somewhere in Italy and it had only taken us two and a half hours to get there too – the kind of thing that you can do on a nocturnal ramble even if the people out there were as surprised as they might have been in the real world. We went out for a walk and ended up along a sea coast but you couldn’t see thesea because of these rows of terraced single storey tenements all in a damp dark red brickwork. All very run-down and depressed. I explained to my partner that this was how Italian families lived – in a big room with a little add-on annex of toilet and cooking space. We walked through and found that all of these habitations were abandoned and there was domestic refuse and rubbish all over the place. By this point I had some kind of four-wheeled vehicle and I’d changed one of the front wheels for another that was of a better style. And in all of the rubbish lying around here – old cameras and all kinds of things – were piles of old motor bikes – the 50cc type of moped and a couple of them were worth recovering, including one in particular that would furnish the front wheel that I needed for my machine. Nevertheless, I wasn’t convinced that it was a good idea to liberate them even though they had the air of being long-abandoned.
A little later I was on my own with a few different people, one of whom was a girl and one of whom was a boy who was quite interested in her and, I suspected, she in him. He was asking all kinds of questions about things and I was replying in my usual cynical manner and it wasn’t until long afterwards that I realised that he was trying to ask specific questions about this girl and my replies would have been exactly the kind of replies that would have frightened him away and that wasn’t my intention at all.

newfoundland canada aout august 2017So crawling off into the bathroom for the usual reasons, I then made my way onto the deck for my first glimpse of Newfoundland – and the huge storm that was just about to envelope all of us.

And here’s a weird thing.

Looking at the messages on my mobile phone there was one from my French network provider “Bienvenue au St Pierre et Miquelon” – the last French possession in North America.

Had we passed so close to there in the night?

storm newfoundland canada aout august 2017And as we approached closer and closer to Newfoundland we could see that there was a major storm brewing along our way.

I’ve heard about these sudden Newfoundland storms before and I didn’t much like the look of this one.

I could picture all of the sailors dashing out to batten down the hatches and all of that, and casting all non-essential gear over the side.

michael averill atlantic vision newfoundland canada aout august 2017So while the sailors were dashing outside, I went a-dashing inside out of the rain.

and here I collided with Mike Averill who was just setting up shop for another performance on his guitar. I stayed and listened to his performance and even bought a CD.

I must be mellowing in my old age – but I really did enjoy his music.

multi-lingual signs atlantic vision newfoundland canada aout august 2017I told you that Atlantic Vision, in her previous existence as Superfast IX had been built to provide a ferry service in the Baltic on behalf of the Swedish Government

Here on the car deck are several signs that are clearly a relic of those days.

This one is written in English, German, Swedish and Estonian – a sad reminder of one of the shortest-lived ferry routes in the whole of history

atlantic vision jana argentia newfoundland canada aout august 2017Having been decanted out of Atlantic Vision onto the mainland I drove off round the headland to find a suitable spot to take a photograph.

Also sitting at the quayside is the extremely controversial freighter called Jana.

She limped into Halifax three years ago with a load of rails from Poland and a misfiring engine, and has been stranded in Canada ever since as no-one knows quite what to do with her.

argentia newfoundland canada aout august 2017The last time that I had been here was in a driving rainstorm and none of my photos had really worked.

But today, with the squall that we had had offshore having passed by so rapidly, I was able to catch up on what I had missed of the bay here.

It really does have an extraordinary beauty.

newfoundland canada aout august 2017And so does the rest of Newfoundland really. Not quite as rugged or as grand as Labrador but beautiful all the same.

I could have taken 100 photographs to show you what I mean, but one will have to suffice.

It should give you a really good idea of just what I mean

So braving the Newfoundland roads, because they really are unbelievably shocking, I found the Trans-Canada Highway and headed for St John’s.

On the outskirts of town I found a Tim Hortons where I could have a coffee and use the internet, and also a Sobey’s where I could stock up with a few more bits and pieces of food. After all, in a week’s time we’ll be in Labrador.

signal hill st john's newfoundland canada aout august 2017Driving all the way through St John’s I headed for Signal Hill and the absolutely beautiful view of the town and its harbour.

It’s the ideal place for me to eat my lunchtime butty, for it’s one of the most stunning views in the world.

You can understand just why the early English and Portuguese seafarers of the 16th Century chose this spot as their favourite harbour in North America.

signal hill st Johns newfoundland canada aout august 2017Having had a good look around and eaten my butty I headed back into town for Donald’s house.

He’d very kindly invited me round for the afternoon and seeing as how we had never actually met in person I reckoned that it might be a good idea to go and catch up.

So braving the potholes, the trenches and the other pitfalls in the road I headed off back through the city.

Donald lives on the edge of town in an upside-down house that backs onto the former Newfoundland Railway tracks, although he wasn’t there when the Newfie Bullet used to go puffing by.

We spent hour chatting about all kinds of things to do with Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador and North America in general, and then I invited him out for a meal.

We ended up in a Chinese restaurant where I had a stir fry of vegetables with rice. And trying to remember my chopstick-eating habits from 40 years ago, I ended up with more on the table than I did down inside my stomach.

They also gave me a fortune cookie. Apparently I am “very sociable and welcome the company of others”. It got my age wrong too.

Donald asked me if I would like to stay the night. And to be honest, his sofa did look rather large and comfortable. I didn’t even have to nip out to Strider for my sleeping bag as Donald rustled up some blankets and the like.

So here I am, in all luxury like a King and I shall be sleeping the Sleep of the Dead.

Good night.

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Sunday 17th October 2010 – SUNDAY NIGHT FOUND ME IN ST. BRIDES

atlantica motel st brides newfoundland canadaAnd I bet you are wondering where this might be. It is in fact right down in the south-east of Newfoundland on the coast of Placentia Bay.

The motel was cold and damp at first, but then again I was the first visitor for 5 weeks and I did appear unexpectedly. But half an hour with the electric heater soon solved the problem.

And Argentia, and Placentia Bay is of some historical significance – it’s a huge deep bay on the south coast of Newfoundland and its historical claim to fame is that it was one of the assembly point of ships sailing from North America during World War II. They would arrive in the bay here and would be marshalled into their appropriate convoys – the Home Fast, the Home Slow, the Arctic Convoys and so on, be allocated a destroyer group to escort them on their voyage, and then they would be sent off into the cauldron that was the Battle of the Atlantic

plancentia bay argentia newfoundland canadaAnd not only that, an important wartime conference took place here between Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941 – 5 months before the USA entered the war. The Atlantic Charter, as it became known, set out Churchill and Roosevelt’s vision for a postwar world.

And the one thing that rings any kind of bell about the Bay – the memoirs of Jack Broome or the biography of “Johnny” Walker for example, will be the mists and the fog and the persistent rain of this area. And do you know what? It’s absolutely pouring down – rain I don’t recall ever having seen before – and the fog is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

deer lake motel newfoundland canada And that is astonishing because for about 9/10ths of my journey across the south of Newfoundland from leaving my motel at Deer Lake until about Clarenville or whatever, the weather was absolutely gorgeous and I was in shirtsleeves.

The moment I crossed the final mountain range to the east coast, the change in the weather was dramatic.

gander airport newfoundland canadaI’ve also been to another historical site today – the airport at Gander. Before he became the officer in charge of Bomber Command, “Bomber” Harris was the chief of the Royal Air Force’s Purchasing Commission in the USA, charged with re-equipping Bomber Command with medium bombers after the Fairey Battles had been annihilated during the retreat to Dunkirk.

He bought a large amount of Lockheed Hudson bombers but hadn’t thought about how he would get them back to the UK.

A young BOAC pilot by the name of Donald Bennett, who had been seconded to his command, said “why don’t we fly them back?” and the Atlantic Ferry was born.

lockheed hudson bomber air museum gander newfoundland canadaBennett, officially a civilian who, in his BOAC days had flown passenger aircraft across the Atlantic in the 1930s, himself flew the first one, from the USA to the civilian airfield at Gander where he refuelled.

On the night of 10th November 1940 as navigator, he led a squadron of Hudsons off for the 16-hour flight to Aldergrove in Northern Ireland, over 2000 miles across the Atlantic. All kinds of planes flew from North America to Europe with the Atlantic Ferry, and the father of Liz (who reads this blog) was a navigator on some of the Halifaxes made in Canada that made the crossing.

war grave world war II military cemeterygander newfoundlandn those days, with primitive navigational aids and unknown climatic conditions the flights could ba hazardous and many machines were lost.

Just outside Gander is a Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery with the remains of 100 aircrew who perished at Gander – either exhausted after the long flight from the USA to Gander and becoming disorientated in the fog, or else failing to leave the ground in the planes so heavily overloaded with petrol for the long flight across the Ocean.

But I saw something in the cemetery that absolutely disgusted me. A woman was there with a dog – off its lead – and it urinated on a grave.

The woman did nothing. I did something – I made the woman completely aware of what I thought about all of this and by the time I had finished she got back into her car with her dog and left the scene. It was a thoroughly shameful display.

car towing two trailers clarenville newfoundland canadaAnd so I finished my journey along the Trans Canada Highway down to the south-east of Newfoundland, admiring the scenery and the rather lax traffic laws that allow all kinds of bizarre combinations of vehicles and trailers to take to the road.

Long-gone are they days when this kind of thing would be tolerated in Europe, and if I could obtain a residence permit for Canada I’d be here like a shot.

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