Tag Archives: brador bay

Tuesday 10th January 2017 – I TIDIED UP …

… this morning. In fact I spent a good 45 minutes making sure that my room was in really good, tidy condition (just for once).

Yesterday afternoon I’d had a knock on the door from the landlord’s sidekick. Would it be okay if they came by at midday and cleaned my room and changed everything around?

Of course it would, and so I spent all of that time making sure that everything was tidy and in its place, and then just before midday I headed into town.

I took my time, bought a pile of stuff in the Delhaize and then slowly wandered back here – to find that they hadn’t been. And here I am at 21:30 and they still haven’t been.

Last night I had my early night and was well-away. But at 01:30 I awoke to a loud noise on the laptop radio. And so I turned it off again and went back to sleep. And that was how I stayed until the alarm went off.

During the night I’d been travelling too – onto a stage where I was playing bass and singing in a rock group. But for some reason I couldn’t co-ordinate the singing with the bass playing and it was all coming out wrong. In fact it was quite a nightmare.

At breakfast I was joined by my Polish housemate (but not, unfortunately my Ukrainian djervushka which was a big disappointment. And immediately after breakfast, the Pole disappeared off with his suitcase. There’s a new arrival in his room but I don’t know who it is.

So apart from shopping and tidying up, I’ve been researching again today. I’ve found some exciting stuff too – the report of a Finnish archaeological expedition to Labrador in 1937 that came to an abrupt halt as the Finns were swept up in the Winter War against the Soviets. What’s exciting about this is that they report a story that they had heard in Newfoundland about a child in Labrador who was killed by a dog-team. This was denied by the inhabitants of the town, so they report, but yet I’ve seen a death certificate of a child in the town where the death has been described as ‘killed by dogs”.

And she’s not the only child so killed either. Look at the entry for 5th July 1941 as an example.

Not only that, there was some talk of the ancient lost (if not mythical) city of Brest being at Brador Bay rather than at Old Fort, following a discovery in 1968 of Basque artefacts there. But I also found the report of an archaeological dig at the site in 2014 where they concluded that it was actually an Inuit site with Basque artefacts having been recovered from elsewhere and reused
by the Inuit.

I was alone for tea, where I finished my kidney bean whatsit (and it was as good as I expected too) and now I’ll try for yet another early night. It’s quiet in here so I may as well take advantage of it. After all, it’s doing me good.

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Monday 22nd September 2014 – STRANDED AGAIN

I was out like a light last night, long before it went dark even. I must have been tired last night.

dodge overnight stop brador labrador coast lower north shore canada september 2014
And I was awake long before it was light too. This was an excellent place to choose for the night and I was impressed with this. I shall add this to my list of potential specs.

I was rather hoping that the weather would change today, and indeed it has. It’s changed for the worse. The fog is still here but the rain is now coming down like rain that I have never seen. It started at about 02:00 this morning.

Not only that, we have our howling gale back, and that is that.

This makes me decide that I don’t have much future in Labrador right now. If it’s raining like this here, what’s it doing in the interior up on the plateau? I know that snow has been forecast for today and tomorrow up there and if it’s coming down anything like this, we’ll all know about it.

I decide to make my way to the ferry and see about retracing my steps, but after a very long wait, I’m given more bad news. All ferries are cancelled until this hurricane blows itself out. Out there in the Strait it’s gusting at 120mph. Even the ferries to the mainland at Cape Breton Island have stopped running.

dodge entering labrador coast canada september 2014Braving the dreadful rain I pushed on up the road and across the border into Labrador.

The Labrador Tourist Information Board is a little more hopeful though. Snow is forecast for today and tomorrow in the mountains over to Goose Bay but there will be a dramatic improvement in the weather starting on Wednesday with temperatures reaching 16°C.

Giving the matter some considerable thought, I decide to head north this afternoon. I can travel part of the way up the road and stop for the night. If I have a reasonable start I should catch the road over the mountains on Tuesday afternoon when it’s been cleared but if there’s snow still lying about, I’ll just hole up and wait for the thaw.

I can’t think of another solution, but I do have a great amount of faith in the Labrador Highways Department.

But amongst the improvements along the highway since 2010, more of which anon, travellers on the Trans Labrador can now avail themselves, free of charge, of a satellite telephone to keep in touch with someone in case of emergency. Definitely a sign of the times and of progress. So armed with a satellite telephone, I head north.

First thing that I notice are signs telling me “rough road next 7kms”. Obviously the person who thought of this one has never ever been further north than the gate across the highway at Red Bay. This is nothing compared to what I’m going to encounter further along the road.

harbour l'anse au loups labrador coast canada september 2014This is the harbour at L’Anse Au Loups, a photo of which I didn’t take in 2010 when I was on my mega-voyage around the Trans-Labrador Highway
.

At least there’s one good thing about coming round here taking photos in this kind of weather is that you don’t have to worry about where the sun is. You can stand anywhere and you aren’t bothered about the sun streaming into the lens at all.

I saw some kind of monument at the side of the road in 2010 and I didn’t have time to go to check it as I was rushing for my ferry.

war memorial l'anse au loups labrador coast canada september 2014Today though, I did have time for a look around.

It is in fact a war memorial and the plaque on there says something along the lines of “at the going down of the sun etc etc we will remember them” – the old Kipling line. However it seems that they haven’t been remembered because this is an overgrown, neglected and forgotten war memorial that hasn’t seen an ounce of attention since I don’t know when.

And on my way to see the memorial I was thoroughly drenched and soaked to the skin just walking the 50 yards there and back, even wearing a proper heavy-duty rain jacket. The weather here is grotesque.

modern labrador coastal drive county cat pond labrador coast canada september 2014This was what they must have been building in 2010 when I came here to the County Cat Pond and noticed them carrying out all of these road works.

I’m not quite sure why as there was nothing that appeared to be wrong to me about the picturesque little road around the shores of the Pinware River that I can see about 200 feet below me. It wasn’t a difficult stretch of road by any means and I enjoyed driving it.

I really don’t see the point of this construction at all. It really makes me wonder what on earth is going on because, beautiful and well-maintained though the surface of the road might be, it’s all up and down and watching a lorry struggle up here with an enormous amount of difficulty can’t have impressed the driver.

I arrived at the Whaling Centre at Red Bay just after 17:00. It has two days when it closes at 17:00 and you can guess what one of them is can’t you? And there’s no UNESCO delegation here today to help me out.

And outside here now the wind is howling. This is a wicked wind that I’m in. That forecasted 120mph wind might not have been an underestimation. What I find totally astonishing is that with this howling wind here blowing like dervishes, we still have all of this fog. It hasn’t moved an inch. Normally, the fog is the first to be blown away in the wind

improvements labrador coast mary's harbour canada september 2014The road however is completely different from how I remember it. Parts of the road are much wider and the surface vastly improved. They seem to be digging up the old road that we know and love and replacing it with the one along which I’m driving.

Talking to one of the road workers here while I was waiting at a stop sign, he tells me that they have been widening this road this summer ready to tarmac the surface. That’s good news for the locals and the tourists although it won’t do much for the environment, bringing so many people here

dreaful road conditions labrador coast canada september 2014However, the road isn’t so good in certain places at the moment, is it? It’ll be interesting to see what it will be like this time next year.

Fuel at Lodge Bay is just 152.9 per litre. That’s not unreasonable for round here and while I’m not exactly desperate for fuel, fuel stations are few and far apart on the Trans Labrador Highway and you should never miss out on an opportunity to fill up the tank.

Now, night is falling and I’ll need to find somewhere to park up ready for the morning.

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Sunday 21st September 2014 – WHAT I SAW ON THE LABRADOR COAST

labrador coast lower north shore quebec canada september 2014Not 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.

mv apollo st barbe newfoundland canada september 2014I 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.

vieux fort old fort bay labrador coast lower north shore quebec canada september 2014Despite 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.

vieux fort old fort bay labrador coast lower north shore quebec canada september 2014Old 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.


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