September 3, 2018

    The sky was sunny on this Labour Day holiday.  There was a light breeze and the temperature was 15°C.  We had the usual wakeup call 30 minutes before the luggage needed to be placed in the hall to be gathered to put on the coach. We managed to fit in two 10 minute walks before and after breakfast. Then departure was at 7:30 a.m. today.  

    Our seat rotation found us at the front seat on the right side by the bus door.  The first stop was the Prime Berth Fisherman’s Wharf near Twillingate. It took 90 minutes starting on route 330 turning at Gander Bay onto route 331 - Route of the Isles and at Boyd’s Cove turned onto route 340. The sign at the entrance had a dory with a comical yellow coated fisherman.

    Prime Berth Fisherman’s Wharf is a private museum created by Dave Boyd. Prime Berth means the best spot for setting your traps allocated by an annual spring lottery for the fishermen to see which location they would “win” for the summer season. He towed his father’s old fishing stage to his property on the water and hauled it up on shore. There are six buildings with artifacts from his father’s fishing career. Dave is also a working fisherman.  He gave a demonstration of the old way of gutting and preparing the cod to be slated for preservation before the advent of refrigeration. In one of the sheds there is a dried specimen of a Sei Whale’s baleen. This hairy looking piece is on the inside of the whale’s mouth and is attached to the upper jaw.  The Sei Whale is 13 to 16 meters long and belongs to the family as blue, fin, humpback and minke whales.  They can live up to 70 years.

    Up by the parking lot is a small gift shop and museum where we serenaded by a man playing an “Ugly Stick”. The “Ugly Stick” is a four cm diameter 1.6 meter stick with a tomato can top which is decorated with “hair” and “eyes”. The stick has several “branches” which hold two dozen beer caps that jingle and the bottom of the stick has a boot or shoe attached. To play the Ugly Stick, the musician pounds it up and down or hits it with a smaller stick to create the rhythm. Dave’s daughter makes jewelry from the tiny inner ear bones of the cod fish.

   Next on Twillingate Island, in the town of Crow’s Head on Notre Dame Bay, was the Long Point Lighthouse with a great view of the Atlantic Ocean. It was built in 1876 and is operated by one lighthouse keeper year-round.  While walking the grounds, we watched a red fox stalk something in a bush, but it never caught its’ prey.  We stopped for ice cream at the gift shop and chose three of two dozen types of fudge to buy. One of the gift shop items was a pair of corn on the cob holders which had small red lobster claws as the handles.

    Then we drove back to Gander for a one hour break for a ‘Scatter Lunch”. We chose to go to Harvey’s for chicken salads, then took a short walk.  Some clouds rolled in about noon, but there was still patches of blue sky. The temperature was around 24°or 25°C.           Steps 9483

   In the afternoon the coach drove on to Terra Nova National Park. It is Canada’s most easterly National Park created in 1957. There were not any whales out for us to see today.  

Terra Nova National Park is located on Bonavista Bay.  Its Boreal Forest consists of 68% of the Black Spruce, 28% Balsam Fir and some pockets of white pine, mountain ash, tamarack and maple. After a short video about the park we went into an area where the “Touching Tank” was located.  It is an aquariummeasuring about four meters by three meters and 30 centimeters deep, where you can reach in and pick up sea creatures such as: Starfish, sea urchins, spider crabs, rock crabs, sea snails, clams, scallops, blue mussels, sand dollar and sea anemone. Fresh sea water is gently pumped into the tank continually to allow microscopic nutrients to feed the inhabitants.  For the last 10 minutes, we took a short walk along a hiking path which had a nice smell as we saw some fungus growing at tree bases and moss covered rocks.

    We headed to today’s destination of Clarenville, in the Shoal Harbour River Valley, which was formed in 1901 from five Randon Sound communities on Trinity Bay which had been served by a railway station called Clarenceville.  The first settlers in the area arrived in the mid 1800s attracted by the timber in the area. Today’s town of about 6,300 was incorporated in 1951. It’s latitude is about the same as Munich, Germany.

    We arrived at the Clarenville Inn for a two night stay and had a buffet dinner in the dining room. Steps 13,211