The Ghost Coast
Above: Abandoned settlements occupy the choicest campsites like this one at Cape La Hune. Opposite: Grand Bruit, alive and kicking.
Galloping Moll. We pull into Burgeo after 35 kilome- tres and a long morning in the saddle. Burgeo is the hub of the Southwest Coast with a
highway to the outside world and an increasingly tran- sient population of 1,700. Te fish processing plant col- lapsed with the cod fishery and the town is now more of a bedroom community for Nova Scotia apple pickers and Alberta roughnecks. Streets of quaint saltbox hous- es radiate haphazardly from the probing fingers of the sea: Short Reach, Long Reach, Mercer Cove and Aaron Arm. Te off-lying islands feel removed from the open ocean and make for great sea kayaking for the same rea- son that Rencontre—the largest of the lot—was chosen as rendezvous site for 17th century French sailors.
• • •
Everywhere we spend a night, entire lives have been lived before us. Smallwood for one was a benefactor of the clichéd Newfoundland hospitality—he need not have carried camping gear on his ice walk. Before the advent of deep-sea trawlers and on-board refrigeration, hardscrabble hamlets sprung up as close as possible to the best fishing grounds—sometimes within shouting distance from each other. Some outports date back 500 years to the time of Basque and French fishers and whalers, ranking them among the oldest European settlements in North America. Up until Newfoundland ceded from England to
become a province of Canada in 1949 and Small- wood took reign, outport communities thrived in an isolated, unheralded kind of way. Smallwood began the process of centralization and the majority of outports—like the codfish—started to disappear. By 1975, more than 300 communities and over 28,000 people had been uprooted. Our Sailing Directions guidebook, published in 1995, describes dozens of communities like Petites that have since been “evacu- ated” due to fishing moratoriums and the lure of
42 ADVENTURE KAYAK | SUMMER 2008
greener pastures—not to mention healthy govern- ment-issued lump-sum compensation. A day’s paddle east of Burgeo, we tuck into a shel-
tered harbour rimmed by 150-metre talus slopes and forested hillsides and find a spectacular campsite on a gravel spit on the north end of Fox Island. Only two houses remain but the rotting cribbing of old fishing stages and a grassy meadow suggest there were once many more. I follow a trickle of a stream up a bram- bly hillside and discover a shallow-dug well brimming with ice-cold, peaty brown, sugary sweet water. Ryan finds the old cemetery on a dome-shaped promontory, its weather-beaten tombstones overlooking the sea. Te weather settles into a stable trend and the next
day we knock off the 18 kilometres of cliff-bound coast between Fox Island and Grey River by lunch. Te com- munity of Grey River occupies all of the marginally flat land in a triangle-shaped bight. Otherwise, the 20-ki- lometre-long granite fiord is inhospitable. After some lean years the outport now bustles, though there’s less activity at the wharf than there is at the helicopter land- ing pad. Te fiord echoes with the whirring thump- thump-thump of rotors and reeks of aviation fuel—the sounds and smells of a prospecting boom. Luckily, the crux of the trip comes on a magical day
of lifting fog, skirting clouds and bright sun and we tackle the better part of the near-continuous 300-me- tre-high cliffs connecting Grey River to Francois in idyllic conditions. Te landscape blows the mind—as much Newfoundland as it is a combination of Alaska, Hawaii and Tailand. A talus valley bound by soaring, glacier-worn buttes fans out to the sea at the tiny in- dentation of Seal’s Rest Cove. And at Cape La Hune, craggy, crumbling spires of volcanic rock contrast with neighbouring slabs of granite. We round the promon- tory rubbernecked and walleyed and set up camp at another abandoned outport. We spend two days at Cape La Hune not because
of miserable weather—by now the Southwest Coast is — The Ghost Coast, continued on page 54
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