The Ghost Coast Left: Moonrise over Newfoundland…or Hawaii?
Right: Taking refuge on a lobster fisherman’s wharf. Opposite: Half-manageable, three-metre seas.
Adventure Kayak editor Tim Shuff, photographer Ryan Creary and I came to Newfoundland with more rational plans. We sea kayaked 200 kilometres of the Southwest Coast, visiting many of the long-lost com- munities Smallwood attempted to unite. For 11 mostly glorious days in September our trip was nothing like Smallwood’s, with no high seas adventure, pack ice or blinding blizzards. But now, hanging over the stern of the coastal ferry as it retraces our route from Francois to Rose Blanche, I can’t help but feel fellow to a man who got to know the people of the Southwest Coast in its heyday, even if it was in the most manipulative way.
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It’s fitting after a whirlwind journey by air and road to get here that Tim, Ryan and I find ourselves hunkered down with too much time on our hands scant kilo- metres from our launching point. We hummed and hawed in the fog at a wharf in Rose Blanche, New- foundland, while the local fishermen looked on with incredulity. Our general plan to spend the better part of two weeks paddling to the isolated outport of Fran- cois was as crazy to them as our immediate intention of launching into the three-metre seas punishing the breakwater. But we set off anyway. An hour later we washed ashore on a decompos-
ing boat slip in the old village of Petites, population two, where gale force westerlies held us captive for two nights. Petites was once one of the hundreds of “out- port” communities spread out along Newfoundland’s 10,000 kilometres of rocky perimetre. Few faces peer from the windows of the 20-odd houses remaining
40 ADVENTURE KAYAK | SUMMER 2008
atop rickety two-by-four stilts at the water’s edge or clinging to the treeless, granite barrens of uptown. De- spite its mid-latitude location, the landscape in this corner of Newfoundland is an arctic-like, windswept and glacier-carved expanse of bogs, domes and fiords. At Petites we befriend one-half of the community’s
resident pair who tells Tim and I how he returned to his birthplace in 2002 and bought a modest two-storey clapboard house for $2,700. A year later, the province sent in its last supply tanker to feed Petites’ diesel gener- ators and most of the citizens collected $80,000 resettle- ment payouts. In choosing to stay, the man says the gov- ernment paid him $12,000 for the house it now leases to him for one dollar a year. Petites’ last holdouts cook with propane and go to bed early. Tey let their subscription to satellite television expire and watch the caribou in- stead. Te next morning, we’re paddling before the first curls of woodsmoke rise from their chimney. Tere are about 90 kilometres of coastline to paddle
between Rose Blanche and Burgeo, made up of rocky jetties, serpentine inlets, bedrock headlands, steep islands and, in the last half, sweeping sand beaches. Leaving Petites, we surf a residual swell and building wind waves past the ghost towns of Westport, French Cove and Cinq Cerf—outports that Smallwood once tried to unionize. Te coastline is pleasantly diverse yet somewhat unremarkable, except for the portion be- tween the active outports of La Poile and Grand Bruit where 300-metre-tall granite cliffs stretch far inland. Wind holds us up for another day-and-a-half and
we make tracks as soon as the swell is half-manageable, skirting the leeward side of a labyrinth of reefs with ominous names like Te Smoker, Te Jumper and Te
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