August 24, 2017:
Jim and I awoke this morning to glorious sunshine, which was quite the relief after a dreary day yesterday. It was all the more surprising when you consider that St. John’s, Newfoundland, has well over 100 days of fog every year, making it the most foggy place on Earth. Many of the businesses in town incorporate “fog” into their names; my favorite was a coffee shop called “Fog Off”.
St. John’s Visitors’ Bureau had certainly rolled out the red carpet for us, up to and including a beautiful Newfoundland dog. Jim and I wandered about the town and saw some of the key sights, including the town hall, the Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Cathedral, and the Supreme Court of the Province of Labrador and Newfoundland. However, my favorite was all the brightly painted row houses that dot the hillside of this neat and friendly town.
As bright and sunny as it is today, it is not terribly difficult to imagine the town cloaked in snow; there are as many taverns and restaurants as there are churches, and many of the stores in town exist in indoor malls like you find in Toronto and Minneapolis. Jay Menzel: this poutine shop is for you! Once again, though, my primary mission this morning was to find a powerful Internet connection so I could upload the last two days blog posts.
Mission accomplished; Jim and I were ready for our excursion today: a whale and puffin watching boat trip into the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve! The Ecological Reserve is about a half hour to the southeast from St. John’s accessed from the harbor town of Bay Bulls. I’m so excited I can barely wait to get on the boat. We’ve never seen puffins in the wild, and the Witless Bay sanctuary is the largest nesting ground of the Atlantic Puffins in the world. About 260,000 nesting pairs of puffins return to the Reserve each year between late spring and summer. The islands are also home to huge colonies of Common Murres (called Guillemots in Europe), Leach’s Storm Petrel, and Black-legged Kittiwakes. There are four islands in the Reserve: Gull, Green, Great and Pee Pee islands.
Today, we will visit Gull Island and go by Green island on our return. As you might imagine, with a name like Gull Island, this nesting ground is also home to thousands of different gulls, which, sadly, feed on baby puffins. Our tour operator for the cruise is O’Briens’ Whale and Puffin Watching Tour; run by the descendants one of the numerous Irish families in this area. Our tour guide, Con O’Brien, is also a very well-known local and national singing star. On the very rough trip over to Gull Island, Con serenaded us with an Irish ballad, and the boat’s sound system played several numbers by his group, the Irish Descendants.
As we approached Gull Island, you first saw puffins in the water, and then in huge swarms flying overhead. As we pulled in closer to the island, you could see them and their hundreds of burrows stretching up the slopes of the island. In many spots, hungry gulls would perch on the slopes near those burrows, just looking for a chance to pick off an unwary puffin. Although I know these are a ton of photos, please appreciate that I took over a 1,000 photos today!
As we piloted around the island, and the topography changed, so did the kind of nesting birds we saw. While the puffins nest in burrows they dig into the grassy banks of the islands, murres lay their eggs right on naked rock ledges. We didn’t see any storm petrels of great auks, but we did see some kittiwakes, which also nest in the rock crevasses, but actually build grassy nests to shelter their eggs.
Then it was time to return to port, and the serious hunt for whales began. Jim took the opportunity to try a local specialty beer called “Iceberg Beer” which aptly describes its water source. In the spring and early summer each year, Arctic icebergs wash down along the east coast of Newfoundland, and the icebergs are harvested to provide the water for the beer. 20,000 years pure, as the Newfoundlanders like to say!
However, it wasn’t until we got back into Bay Bulls that we saw our first (and only) whale. This was a humpback grazing in the harbor, and it accommodatingly surfaced several times so we could record its passing.
On the way back to town, we stopped briefly for a photo opp in the scenic little town of Petty Harbor. Had we gone a couple more miles to the east, we would have seen the lighthouse at Cape Spear, which is the eastern-most point in North America. But, no worries! We will sail out within view of it tonight.
Once we got back to the ship, Jim and I headed up to the top deck to snap some final pictures of the terraced skyline of St. John’s. Jim and I enjoyed the sail away from the beauty of our balcony deck. We are pretty darn sure that as we enter the Labrador Current tonight enroute to Greenland, that this is the last night we will be able to enjoy the balcony in a long while! See you in a couple of days when we pull into port in Nuuk, Greenland!
Vaya con Gringos 