Greenland Passage

During our stay on Bonne Bay yesterday the Fram first stopped at Woody Point, a short ride on the Polar Cirkel tender boats as you can see from the photo above. The rain had stopped by the time we landed, with some travelers heading to an excursion into the park or a trail hike. I wandered the town. Both Woody Point and Norris Point across the bay (where the captain maneuvered the Fram for our afternoon landing, and more excursions and hikes for those so inclined) are fishing towns, although during the summer both communities can be overwhelmed by visitors to Gros Morne National Park, hence a number of music and literary fests and events during the season. But it was the fishing that hooked my interest. In Woody Point the center of the local fisheries is the 3T processing plant, owned by three brothers, Todd, Tom and Terry Young. At the retail store around the corner you can purchase their catch, usually in frozen form. The bargains hawked in the 3T store's window includes...

Bonne Bay, along the west coast of Newfoundland, is the gateway to Gros Morne National Park . And the park is all about rock. Some of the oldest you can find. And it's a place where the earth's mantle breaks the surface. No wonder it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I'm not particularly into geology, having been bored silly by John McPhee's "Basin and Range" and the similar tomes produced by a writer I admire, so I skipped the arduous hikes into the park's landscape. But even from our landing sites (we anchored in the morning off Woody Point, then moved during lunch to Norris Point) the stark beauty of this unique spot could be taken in, Here are some more photos: Vessel at far left, next to our Norris Point landing site, was unloading salt for the winter

Prior to this cruise, all I knew about St. Anthony was from a cable television reality series from six years ago, "Iceberg Hunters." The four-episode series followed locals as they took their small boat out to the icebergs congregated offshore, shot off pieces with their rifles then hauled them back to shore for bottling as water (or perhaps as part of the distillation process of making vodka). The town, the largest on Newfoundland's northern peninsula, remains a hub for fisheries, though the trawlers, draggers and netters based here travel as far as Greenland waters for shrimp, scallops and finfish. St. Anthony and the region, including mainland Labrador across the Belle Isle Strait, are closely associate with Sir Wilfred Grenfell, born in the north of England, who after hearing American evangelist Dwight L. Moody in London found his calling: Grenfell joined the Royal Mission for Deep Sea Fishermen and in 1892 dispatched to Newfoundland where he devoted his life to i...