BRAS D'OR LAKES

NEXT DOOR TO HEAVEN
An elderly story teller told us the other day about the people of Cape Breton Island who are now scattered all over the world. Every one of them says he or she would go back..if only they could find work there etc. Well according to this story teller a man died and went to heaven and walking around saw a huge concrete wall. "What is that for?" he asked. "All the Cape Bretoners are behind that wall. If we didn't have that they'd all go back", came the reply. So according to Cape Bretoners this is next door to heaven.

For a cruising sailor it certainly comes close to perfection. As usual getting here was not easy. On Monday August 6 we were ready to leave Halifax and planned to sail about 10 miles offshore direct to St Peter's canal, a journey of approximately 160 nautical miles. Bruce was still suffering from jet lag and the forecast for the next day included strong winds, rain and fog. The forecast for later in the week looked even worse so we decided to take the risk. We started early in the morning in calm, misty conditions. The mist lifted and the breeze filled in . It was a perfect day and we were romping along at about 7 knots. At that speed we calculated we would arrive in the dark and fog too early on Tuesday for the lock operation at the canal. We did not relish the idea of winding through the narrow channels into the canal without good visibility. We slowed down. Tuesday morning was overcast with a few light showers but without the fog and strong winds that had been forecast. We had no problems navigating into the lock and being lifted about 3 feet to the level of the Bras D'Or lakes. The lakes are huge salt water lakes open to the sea on the north but the difference in tides means there is nearly always a difference in levels at St Peters where a canal was cut through the isthmus and opened in 1869.

By the time we had picked up a mooring at St Peters marina which is kept in immaculate condition and run by the local Lions club we had been travelling for 28 hours. One night to recover and we were off to explore the lakes. It seemed strange to be in salt water in huge lakes surrounded by magnificent mountains clad in dense forest of deciduous and evergreen trees. The anchorages are beyond compare. A gale warning was out for the next day so we headed for a tight protected anchorage called Cape George Harbour. The entrance was so narrow that we found it hard to believe that an ocean going yacht the size of ours could enter. The water was deep and led to a totally protected anchorage with just enough swinging room but surrounded by forest. This surely is a cruisers dream. It was the first of many wonderful anchorages, all pristine wilderness spots offering great protection. Although the lakes are large the water is warm and even in strong winds only seems to build to a tolerable chop. After 5 days of heavenly wilderness we headed through the Barra Strait through an opening road bridge to the town of Baddeck (population 1000). It is a picturesque little town hugging the edge of the Great Bras D'Or and offers many delights to the visitor. We attended our first Ceilidh with blazing fiddles, jigs, Gaelic songs, poetry, stories and step dancing. Bonnie and I sat in the front row and were volunteered to learn some of the dance steps. What great fun! As we sailed into Baddeck we spotted a magnificent mansion built on a high point. "Wow" said Bruce, "How would you like the views from there". We later discovered that what we were looking at was Beinn Breagh the home built by Alexander Graham Bell the inventor of the telephone and still used by his descendants. Bell and his wife Mabel were both buried on Beinn Breagh. Every visitor to Baddeck must visit the Bell museum. It is a beautiful monument to a man who not only invented the telephone but pioneered human flight, hydroplanes and light transmitted sound. He is still spoken about with great reverence by the people in the town.
More wonderful protected anchorages inspired conversation like, "Let's sell the boat and buy or build a cottage on one of these bays. Six months a year in Australia and six months a year in the summer in Cape Breton seem like a good way to wind down in life." The thought of leaving and beating back along the coast into the prevailing wind does not have a lot of appeal after this heaven.

A FREE LUNCH

We had been in Halifax once before in our lives, the summer of 1971 but spent most of our time in Dartmouth at a church conference. We could not really remember much of Halifax at all and like all cities it has changed dramatically in the last 36 years. Walking down the main street, Barrington Street one day we noticed a sign in front of an old Anglican Church. It read, "There is such a thing as a free lunch. Meet with the Rector for lunch at 12.00 noon on Wednesday; no sermon; no strings attached." The next day our bus arrived in the city at 1215 and Bonnie said, "Today is Wednesday, I wonder if we are still in time for the free lunch. We almost ran into the church as any yachtie offered a free meal would do. We were welcomed warmly and fed well on freshly made sandwiches and tea. One of the parishioners asked polite questions like, "Where are you from?", "Is this your first visit to Halifax?" Bruce replied vaguely, "I think I've been here before; as a matter of fact I think I was the guest preacher at this church in July 1971." One of them disappeared into the church archives and returned with an ancient looking vestry book. We turned the yellowing pages gently to July 1971 but there was no record of Bruce as preacher. We turned the page again to August 1971 and there on the second Sunday in August at the 11am service of Morning Prayer was the unmistakable scrawl of one K.B. Marriott as preacher. We were flabbergasted. Bruce said, "The building seems right but I was sure it had a road in front of it". "It did",came the reply, "The road was closed a few years ago to create a park between the church and the City Hall." The church was St Paul's; the oldest Anglican Church in Canada built in 1750. We now knew that we were part of history so we decided it should be our spiritual home for the short time we were to remain in Halifax.
Halifax has been the centre of several of the world's greatest civilian disasters (not including Bruce's preaching). It was the rescue centre and morgue for the Titanic disaster and the centre of the biggest man made explosion prior to the atomic bomb. Both are movingly recorded in the Maritime Museum. We knew very little about the Halifax explosion which occurred in 1917 when two ships collided in the harbour. One was a French ship heavily laden with the most powerful explosives then known and heading for the war in Europe. A fire started and she drifted towards the dock before she exploded. More than 2000 people were killed and many thousand more injured. St Paul's church became a morgue with dead bodies literally stacked everywhere.

After a few more touristy things we were ready to leave for the Bras D'Or lakes in Cape Breton Island, when we received an urgent phone call. Bruce's sister Dorothy was fading quickly. We now knew why we had felt compelled to make a rush trip to Newfoundland and were still in Halifax. It was possible for Bruce to fly home leaving Bonnie on the boat securely moored at the Armdale Yacht Cub with great support from some of the club and church members. The nightmare of 10 flights, 12 security checks, preparing and delivering a funeral eulogy for Dorothy and handing over her affairs to her executors; all in 7 days will hopefully fade into a lost file one day. It was all a bit much for the old man and on his return, after standing in line for 2 hours to check in to a hotel at JFK and over 2 hours lined up the airport, he missed his flight from New York to Boston. Fortunately he was able to get on later flights the same day. A few days of recovery and we were sailing into a cruisers heaven; Bras D'Or lakes, Cape Breton Island.

NEWFOUNDLAND

We had barely settled in Halifax when we decided to make a rush trip to Newfoundland. Stories of its rugged people and its rugged environment had always fascinated us and we had intended to sail to its southern coast to visit some of its remote fishing villages with no road access but even if we found time to do that we felt sure we would not have time to visit the rest of the huge island before the end of their short summer. Checking the Internet revealed that all the organized tours were expensive and didn't fit our schedule. For some unknown reasons we felt compelled to make the trip immediately. So in typical style we decided to do our own thing. Having arrived on Thursday July 5, completed our laundry and found our way around Halifax by bus, we attended worship at the Dartmouth Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) then boarded a bus for North Sydney on Sunday July 8. The bus tip was a bit of a milk run calling in to all manner of small towns on and slightly off the route to the top end of Cape Breton Island. The scenery was magnificent especially around the Bras d'Or lakes area and take 8 hours but the trip was too interesting to become a drag. We spent the night in a basic motel room and took an early morning taxi to the ferry at 0630. The ferry trip from North Sydney to Argentia in Newfoundland is a 14 hour journey and the Cabot Strait is famous for its foul weather and fog. We timed our trip to perfection and sailed on smooth seas under crystal clear skies. We had clear view of France as we sailed past St. Pierre & Michelon islands in the Cabot Strait. They have resisted all pressures to become part of Canada and visitors are required to be cleared by customs as entering France.

Newfoundland itself only became part of the Confederation of Canada in 1949. Their quaint accents and blend of Irish folk music and country music suggested to us that prior to that they were and outpost of Ireland, but they would reject such a suggestion with the same rugged independent streak that led them to reject Confederation for more than 80 years.
A local bus took us from Argentia to the Capital, St. John's and we stumbled into bed at 0200 Tuesday morning. St. John's claims to be the oldest settlement in North America but we had allowed ourselves just one day and two nights to explore it. We walked all day, around the town, around the tight deep harbour, around the coast past small cottages perched perilously on the cliff face with attached derelict boat docks loaded with fishing gear, to view the narrow harbour entrance. We then climbed to the top of Signal Hill where we celebrated the fact that we now stood on the spot where Guglielmo Marconi made history by receiving the first trans-Atlantic wireless signal. All he managed to hear was three beeps (Morse code for the letter S). It probably was about as meaningful as some of the stuff we struggle to hear on our HF radio today. Why on earth didn't he put up a satellite and have a decent conversation.

Seal Flipper Pie was out of season so we settled on another traditional meal; a jig dinner, served in a small back room of a local convenience store. It consisted of salted beef (nor corned) mashed potato, turnip, cabbage, carrot and split pea pudding. It certainly filled us up but we wondered if it could be one of the reasons for the lower than average life expectancy in Newfoundland. We ate jig and listened to a jig at the same time (an Irish, Newfoundland type played over the shop speaker system). The next song was one we knew and could sing along with; "We'll rant and we'll roar like true Newfoundlanders" and so we did.

We were keen to get to Gros Morne National Park as soon as possible and traveled by bus to Deer Lake only to find that the local bus company had failed to register our booking and the small mini bus was already crammed full. A local courier agreed to take us along with his packages to the Gros Morne Hostel where we had a firm booking, but when we arrived at the Hostel it was filthy dump of a broken down cottage in the middle of nowhere. The young proprietor flustered about saying that he had nowhere suitable for us to stay. We reminded him that he had accepted our booking for a private room only two days earlier. He said he thought we would be better off staying at the Norris Point Hostel and he had arranged to pay the first night's accommodation for us. We had to pay the driver another $10 each to go back to a place we had passed earlier and when we arrived there the manager of the hostel knew nothing about us and had received no payment from the other hostel. We were now $30 out of pocket. Until 5 years earlier the Norris Point Hostel had been the local hospital so its dormitory was a four bed hospital ward with privacy curtains for each bed and the kitchen, dining and shower facilities were great. We even had access to the back room which still housed an ancient X-ray machine and surgical instruments including forceps that had probably helped many of the local residents into the world. A shelf contained medical text books on anatomy and surgery dating back to 1911. It was a vast improvement on the hostel that had turned us away. The next day we set off to climb the Gros Morne Mountain.

Climbing Gros Morne
Gros Morne is the second highest peak in Newfoundland rising abruptly from the fiords to a height of 806 metres. The Gros Morne National Park has been declared a world heritage area because of its geological features and its outstanding physical beauty.
The park has a number of walking trails and it is also possible to do extended walking away from the trails provided you book ahead of time and undertake a one day orientation/training program. The marked trains vary in difficulty and the highest degree of difficulty is given to the Gros Morne Mountain. The trail is 16km long but we first had to walk about 8km to the start of the trail. Because the climb is very exposed and the weather subject to sudden change we travelled with day packs full of extra clothing and wet weather gear as well as the usual safety essentials. The locals advised us that if you can't see the top of the mountain don't go. It was a fine clear day and bald, almost flat topped tundra dome was clearly visible from sea level so we went.
The first 4km of the climb was comparatively easy as the trail winds through the forest, across a bridge over a fast flowing stream and up some well made steps and boardwalks. It climbs steadily from sea level to 320m. We met three other walkers on this lower section, a retired couple from Vancouver and a young Austrian, and for safety in numbers we agreed to stay together.
The next stage was very exposed and required us to climb very steeply up a scree slope of frost shattered rock. It required the use of both hands and both feet in places and we soon realized that a couple of members of our newly formed party were a bit slower than us. It didn't matter much because in July the days this far north (51 degrees) are long. We had plenty of daylight hours as long as the weather held. The next 400 meters of elevation up the scree slope took us an hour and a half but we did stop to regroup and have lunch. Once we were out of the rock gully the climb became more gradual and more of a true arctic tundra with sparse stunted vegetation. The summit was a sea of rock known as felsenmeer. It made for rough walking. The trail was marked by cairns and edged with rocks. Frequently the top of the mountain is blanketed in cloud but for us it was clear and sunny and while it was cooler than the lower elevations we didn't need the extra clothing we had carried.
The trail continues over the back of the mountain where it is edged with a low stone wall to stop unwary walkers from getting too close to a steep drop into a fiord known as Ten Mile Pond. We stepped over the wall and walked closer to the drop to be rewarded with one of the most stunning views of our walking careers. Far below us cut into a steep ravine was a magnificent fiord type lake surrounded by mountains which continued for as far as the eye could see. We descended past remnant patches of snow drift, through an area called Ferry Gulch with views of hanging lakes, ravines and trickling waterfalls to satiate our desire for things beautiful. It was a long tiring section across a scree slope and down a boulder strewn path to rejoin the lower section of the trail through the forest to the starting point. We had hoped to see some wildlife as the area is populated by moose, caribou, and black bear but while we saw fresh droppings from all three, and Bonnie swears she heard a bear grunting nearby, we did not actually see them. We did see a few birds including a Rock Ptarmigan and her chicks and an American Pipit but we were mostly captivated by the views. It was 7pm by the time we reached the end of the trail and while we were physically tired we did not regard it as an extremely difficult walk. If anyone is planning to follow in our footsteps it is worth noting that the trail is closed from May 1 to June 30 so that the wildlife can do spring things without being disturbed.

Icebergs and Missionaries.
The next morning a couple of young women at the hostel decided they wanted to get to the top end of the island to see icebergs and asked if we would like to share the cost of hiring a car. But there was no local car hire business. They were not deterred and set off to see a local taxi driver and came back a short time later with a borrowed car on the promise of a prompt return by the evening of the next day and payment of an amount the equivalent of hiring a vehicle at the nearest legal car hire business many miles away. (Only in Newfoundland!) The small group of odd bods travelled north;, visited the archaeological site of a Viking settlement dating back 1000 years. Having descended from the Vikings ourselves we were fascinated by the discoveries and the reconstruction of a Viking settlement they have now created. They were great sailors, navigators, boat builders and craftsmen but they died young.
We had made no bookings for overnight accommodation and when we arrived in St Anthony we found everything fully booked. Following suggestions from those who turned us away we finally arranged by phone for a room in a Lodge some distance out of town, but with only vague ideas of price of facilities. When we finally arrived, it was getting dark; the motel looked deserted and we walked into a dimly lit lobby where we were greeted by a gaunt elderly man, who looked a bit like Uncle Fester from the Munsters, seated and peering at us from behind a high reception desk. The ghost spoke slowly and deliberately and held out is pale skinny hand as he squeaked, "Hello, my name is Bruce". The three girls looked as if they were about to run away in fright but Bruce clasped the skin draped bones and said in almost mimicking tones "Hello, my name is Bruce". After a pregnant pause in which the receptionist looked stunned as if someone was making a joke of him, Bruce quickly added, "My name really is Bruce". A flicker of a smile and we were soul mates from opposite ends of the world. We finished up with four people in a huge room with two queen size beds for the price normally charged for two. (Only in Newfoundland!)

It was an exceptional year for icebergs so we decided to go out on a boat tour to visit some. The biggest one just outside the harbour of St Anthony was 180 feet out of the water and was grounded in a depth of over 300 feet. We motored around it in awe and then went off in search of whales but without success.

For us the most significant experience was visiting the Grenfell Centre established in St Anthony to commemorate the work of Sir Wilfred Grenfell, pioneer missionary and Doctor who revolutionized health care for the people in the remote areas of Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1890's. He was a true giant of a human being, physically morally and spiritually and the story of his survival on a piece of disintegrating pack ice still makes for spine chilling reading.

We traveled back to Halifax by bus to Port-aux-Basques, overnight ferry to North Sydney and bus to Halifax but not before sampling many of the home style goods still produced in Newfoundland. Treasures like Partridge Berry Jan, Sweet Mustard Pickles like grandma used to make, and hand knitted cable stitch pure woollen sweaters, came with us or will stay in our memories for ever. It is the only place we have visited where a whole community seems to have retained those wonderful old style values, wrapped in genuine care and helpfulness. Things the rest of the world seems to have lost.