A Newfoundland Adventure to Remember

The Canadian government had an idea back in the 1960s that the island of Newfoundland would be easier to manage if people moved out of its remote backwaters to a few larger cities, where modern services were available. A "resettlement" plan was devised in which outport residents were paid bonuses to give up the rural life and relocate.

The hope was that little towns like the ones along the fogbound southern coast where roads don't go would simply fade away -- and some did. But some Newfoundlanders are as resistant to change as the granite cliffs that delineate their shores, and by good fortune many stayed on.

It is harder today, now that codfish are scarce and protected, for inhabitants to carve out a living, but the villages persist, compounds of 50, 100 or 150 folks tucked into fjords carved by glaciers thousands of years ago, the modest wooden houses clinging to patches of soft ground along a windswept coast. You will not find anything quite like it anywhere.

Three of us went exploring Newfoundland's fjord country by boat earlier this month, poking into remote towns such as LaPoile, Grand Bruit, Ramea, Jerts Cove and Francois and even remoter, largely uninhabited spots like Grey River, Hare Bay and Doctor's Harbor north of the booming town of Burgeo, the only place on the south coast where a road goes.

Approaching the inlets from the sea was an act of faith. The cut-throughs showed on maritime charts clearly enough, but these slender slashes in cliffs up to 1,000 feet high were hard to identify until you were almost on top of them, particularly in a fog.

Inching along the coast, guided by imprecise GPS and radar, you felt your way around rocks and shoals until a bell or buoy appeared, then forged bravely between massive rocks to find a tiny town plugging along on the banks of a fjord that might carve a track five miles or more into the back-country.

"You boys are in luck," said Melvin Bond when we pulled alongside the government wharf in La Poile (pronounced, "La-pile") after a breezy, 120-mile overnight sail across the Cabot Strait from Sydney, Nova Scotia. We were indeed blessed with rare sunshine, but there was more. "Today's our annual La Poile Day," said Bond, beaming. "We've got a band a-coming."

Bernie and the Boys, a threesome from Port aux Basques featuring guitars and accordion, didn't start playing until 10 that night and didn't quit till after 2 a.m., which might have been a problem, considering we were tied up 30 feet from the bandstand. But the music was sweet, the dancing old-fashioned, and we were exhausted anyway after the long day trekking hillsides for a better view and watching the cake-walk, the Bingo game and the handful of beer-crazed men leaping from the roof of the wharf office into the freezing harbor.

We were also well fed, thanks to Donald Organ, 75, who was born on the island and never strayed. He was fileting fresh-caught cod with his son-in-law (there are still enough cod left for a limited recreational season) when Ian Smith, off our 44-footer Jackrabbit, passed by and expressed interest. Organ bagged him up a mess of fillets and a handful of one of the region's sweetest delicacies--codfish tongues.

Smith wasted no time sauteeing it all in butter. Skipper Tom Vesey of Bermuda set the table aboard his Freedom ketch and we sat down to a feast that makes my mouth water even now, just thinking about it. (Codfish tongues, by the way, are the size of a poker chip and sweet as ice cream.)

Organ came by later to raise a glass of black Bermuda rum with us. A lifetime of commercial codfishing has left him strong and tanned and clear of eye. It's not so easy for younger men, he said, many of whom head off in winter to work 12-hour days in the oilfields of Alberta, leaving their families on the island, then come back summers and fish as much as they can under the government's strict codfish conservation quotas.

Organ and his burly son, Winston, were among the last standing when Bernie and the Boys packed up at 2 a.m. Organ, it seemed, had danced with every woman, but he was up early the next morning to offer a pack of frozen cod fillets for our journey. It was a kindness repeated often as locals slipped us cod, redfish and mackerel without a thought.

The sunshine gave out the next day and it was the last we'd see of it. It was replaced by a damp, cold, low-hanging haze that occasionally touched the sea in the form of fog. "With the Gulf Stream as close as 40 miles offshore and the cold Labrador Current inshore, this place is a fog factory," said Doug Bruce of Camden, Maine, the only other pleasure cruiser we encountered on the trip. Sailing conditions are "just difficult enough and the weather is just bad enough to keep the riff-raff out, thank God," he said.

Vesey's boat is seaworthy and has all the latest navigation gear, so we never felt in danger, even when weathering gales and rough seas. Our course took us 50 miles east along the coast as far as Hare Bay, where we anchored five miles up the fjord and explored an abandoned fisherman's shack. The roof was falling in but a woman's sweater still hung neatly on the back of a kitchen chair and a wooden skiff lay moldering on the beach, as if the occupants had simply left for a walk. It was eerie.

We explored several deep, winding "fee-hordes," as the locals call them, where in many cases there was no place fit to anchor until far up at the headwaters, where mud and kelp deltas finally replaced the rocky depths.

At the end of the week, we sailed back 170 miles across the Laurentian Straits into a building gale that broke with a fury as we neared the Nova Scotia shore. Lightning, sheets of rain and 40-knot gusts buffeted the boat, but already the lights of civilization were back in view and the real adventure, the one that outport Newfoundlanders live every day, was over for us.