Steve Bradley The crossing from Battle Harbour in Labrador to Newfoundland across the Strait of belle Isle was a pleasant sail. We were hoping this would continue, so we could make fast progress south, but the next few weeks would bring a constant mix of low pressure, high wave forecasts and wind from the south and west. So our journey was paused on several occasions. We were also a little distracted by the amazing hospitality and welcome we recieved in every harbour we visited.
Crossing paths with the vikings in St Anthony’s
Our first stop in Newfoundland was St. Anthony’s. It is a town known for being the perfect spot watch ice berg’s floating by in late spring and early summer.
Along with the ice, we discovered that polar bears have always been visitors to Labrador and Newfoundland but in recent years, the impact of global warming has resulted in more frequent sightings. As a result of shrinking arctic ice fields and sea ice forcing the bears to spend extended periods on land. Perhaps as a reminder, St Anthony has a stuffed polar bear in the entrance of the town library.
We parked the boat at the old fishing dock behind a big trawler. The place offers no specific yacht facilities, but lots of hospitality. The local Canadian coast guard let us fill up our fresh water on their floating pontoon, which was great as it gave us an opportunity to properly flush the tanks. We were still a little uncertain if our fresh water systems were completely clean after the contaminated water we took onboard in Quaqtoq, Greenland.
We should mention that wherever possible we use a general ecology dockside filter when filling up our water tank. It removes impurities, sediment and chlorine but the industrial fire hose in Quaqtoq could not be attched to it. We will never make that mistake again.
A must do when visiting St. Anthony’s is walking up the Daredevil Trail to enjoy the fantastic view from the top. Sarah coulden’t resist the challenge of running up this trail.
We also had a nice dinner at the Lighthouse Cafe where (in the spring) it is possible to have a meal and watch the ice bergs floating by. We met a friendly guy from the UK, who had been sailing in the area and gave us a lift back to the boat in his hired car.
L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site
The next morning at the dock we met 2 friendly Newfoundlanders who had come to welcome us. They had planned a trip to L’Anse aux Meadows and invited us to join.
This UNESCO site is the spot where 1000 years ago the Vikings are said to have first set foot on North American soil. The remains of their camp, discovered in 1960 by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, remains the oldest known European settlement in North America.
Archeological evidence suggests that the Vikings stayed for approximately 10 years and that the camp was an exploration base and trading station where the local Indians and the Vikings exchanged goods. For some reason, most probably a combination of climatic and economic changes, the Vikings were forced to leave.
We saw this as a perfect opportunity to call an official end to our 2024 Viking Route Crossing where we sailed from Ireland to Canada, a passage of over 4000NM
Continuing to Lewisporte
Like the Vikings before us we also had to leave. We moved on to Lewisporte, which we were eager to get to as we had several packages with parts for converting the boat’s shore power electricity to American standards waiting for us at the Yacht Club and Marina.
Lewisporte was the first proper marina with floating pontoons that we had seen since leaving Reykjavik! It was great to tie up to a sheltered floating pontoon again and the lovely clubhouse offered all the good stuff: showers, toilets, a kitchen and laundry.
We also noticed a travel hoist for lifting up the boat and the helpful harbour staff without a problem found a time for a lift and a wash off, giving us the opportunity to properly service the propeller, check anodes and the hull for any ice damage (fortunately there was only a little paint missing). Overall condition was pretty good considering the last haul out was in a year earlier in Bodø, Norway.
The harbour manager also helped us with a lift to buy a new refillable gas bottles and we quickly got on with the electrical and gas conversions.
In the packages we also had a new small self-tailing winch to replace our reefing winch. This year we have perfected the art of winching down the main sail to reef. This is so much safer and controlled when sailing downwind or reaching in strong winds than trying to head the boat into wind. Our existing winch was not self tailing necessitating the use of three hands. One to ease the main halyard, one to handle the reefing eye/hook and reefing clutch, and one to tail the reefing line. The new self tailing winch will now mean it’s a one person two hand job.
We were also met by Richard, a well known local who gave us a tour of the town and proudly showed us around the old fire station museum that he had restored, before taking us to see his impressive personal art collection.
It is easy to spend some relaxing days in Lewisporte as the people here are so friendly. There are no fancy restaurants in the town and the bars are not particularly cozy but just next to the marina there is a fantastic local cafe that remains open some evenings Kinden’s Bakery and Café. The owners father was Danish and had a bakery in Denmark.
Pitstop in Twillingsgate
With a clean hull and all the boat maintenance work completed, we decided to head for Bonavista.
Our route gave us short overnight stop in Twillingsgate harbour which is a popular day sail destination for all the boats at Lewisporte. It’s an easy entrance and we arrived just as the sun was setting but found that restaurants were closed for the season. It looks like a really charming fishing harbour though and all the boats have been painted with pretty motives on the hulls.
We departed early and our next stop over was a much more challenging entrance into Lumsden Harbour. We arrived after dark on a moonless night and found that the narrow and shallow entrance to the harbour is very exposed to swell and almost abandoned our attempt to enter twice as we approached. We would not recommend arriving here in anything but calm conditions but once inside the harbour we felt very protected.
Arriving into small harbours at night is always nerve wracking: lights on the shore can be very disorientating, channel markers may not be where you expect them, and distances are difficult to gauge, narrow entrances appear to be far narrower than they are in daylight and you put a lot of trust in your chart plotter and GPS position.
We departed soon after daybreak so we could reach Bonavista before dark and on our way there we sailed past the biggest group of dolphins we have ever seen. There were hundreds of them all around as far as we could see. We have learnt since that these “megapods” can sometimes contain several thousand dolphins, and such gatherings can often be seen in this area.
Realxing days in Bonavista
By a chance we had come across the town of Bonavista while researching the harbours in the area and decided to make a stop there. That was not a bad decision! Again, as we were arriving at the end of season some of the cafées and reststaurants had already closed, but we got a chance to try the newly opended Lovely grand bake shop, which made wonderful breakfast and had local made kombucha. We also really enjoyed a dinner at The Quintal café and bistro.
We also had a great unexpected experience at The Garrick Theatre, where we accidentally walk into a live concert that we were allowed to enjoy for free because it was halfway through when we got there. They were an energetic local folk band from St John’s called Rum Ragged.
Historic houses and UNESCO nature
It’s a very commercial harbour with a lot of ships arriving and departing each week, many of these are vessels that service the large Hibernia oil field a couple of hundred miles south east of St John’s, the hibernia production platform is the worlds largest oil platform.
Bonavista is full of historic houses, many of which are beautifully painted like pretty dolls houses.
There are also plenty of hikes in the area. We walked to the Dungeon Provincial Park, which is a collapsed sea cave. We didn’t really know what to expect from this, but it a quite amazing natual phenomenon, that was well worth a walk.
We also walked to the headland to see the iconic Cape Bonavista Lighthouse that brings the thoughts of a big piece of candy with its red and white stripes. It is possible to go inside an see how the light house keepers family lived, which was a lot less isolated than many other light house keepers. This was also a beautiful walk along the coast.
Bay de Verde and St. John’s
We made one more overnight stop at Bay de Verde, a very sheltered fishing harbour at the northern tip of conception bay but we were now ready and eager to visit the capital of Newfoundland, St. John’s.
We have to say, that we fell in love with this place from the moment we saw the dramatic harbour entrance. Being an old stronghold for the British, the entrance channel known as the narrows had armouries and cannons on both sides.
Further into the entrance small colorful houses are placed along the steep cliffs and the main harbour is busy with cargo ships, supply vessels, coastguard ice breakers and fishing vessels.
There are no facilities for visiting sailing yachts here, so once again we were parked along a commercial concrete dock covered with old lorry tires. The harbour can experience some surge if there is a swell entering the harbour entrance, and we were located close to the noisy container terminal that’s in operation 24/7. We did however have electricity, and we were right in middle of the downtown area.
Big city life, dramatic hikes, museums and night life
St. John’s is a vibrant and picturesque town with lots of opportunities to dine out, drink at cosy bars and hear live music. Until 1949 Newfoundland & Labrador were still under British rule and were the last Provence to join Canada. Many of the people here are descendants from southern Ireland and this does not go unnoticed as there are lots of Irish bars. The live music has its roots in Ireland and some people sound like they just moved over from the Emerald Island with very distinct Canadian/Irish accents.
The absolute must try cafe would be The Nook and Cannery, which makes a killer turkey sandwich and falaffel on naan.
We walked the North Head trail, to Signal Hill which offers great views over the channel and Atlantic sea. It’s a moderate hike with lots of steps and it was particularly windy when we were there. At the top you get to visit the impressive historic fortress.
We also walked to the picturesque harbour of Quidi Vidi where there are several good restaurants. We had a lovely lunch at Mallard Cottage.
We visited The Rooms, St John’s cultural centre where history, heritage and artistic expression come together and learnt about history of Newfoundland & Labrador and saw the latest art exhibitions.
We were lucky to see the art of Denyse Thomasos, whose art amazed us. It is also very nice to meet the local artist Richard Steele, who will paints colourful pictures from around the town of St John’s and further afield in Newfoundland. Christina Parker gallery has a great collection of contemporary artist from the area.
We also rented a car for a couple of days using the Turo app, which is a really nice way to get a chance to see more of the inland. We drove to the strange little tunnel in Brigus, that apparently made as a private dock and to the town of Dildo, which is now better known for its unusual name than for the historic landing of a German plane in the water and the huge octopus that was caught here.
Leaving Snow Bear at the Royal Newfoundland Yacht Club
Our original plan was to reach Halifax before taking a trip back to Europe but the weather had different ideas. So rather than waiting endlessly for wind from a favourable direction we decided decided to leave the boat in Newfoundland and fly from St John’s.
We sailed back into Conception Bay and headed into the Royal Newfoundland Yacht Club. This is a very protected marina with a restaurant, showers and laundry, and a very active sailing school with dinghies going out several times a week. They even have an outdoor swimming pool but it’s only open in the summer months. They are very helpful and welcoming here and we were surprised to hear that only 5-6 yachts had visited in 2024.
Coming into the marina we were expecting some current as it is a narrow channel, but we were caught off guard as to how strong it actually was. Fortunately we were met by one of the Ocean Cruising Club port officers who was ready to take our lines.
While sailing in Newfoundland we have noticed that the wind is often significantly higher than predicted. All our forecasts said the sail from St. John’s to the yacht club would be around 12 knots, but most of the time it was between 25 and 35 knots.
Before leaving Newfoundland Steve had to take a taxi back to the St John’s CBSA office to complete some paperwork to temporarily import the boat into Canada for the duration of our time away. He will then need to visit them again when he gets back to cancel the import paperwork – fortunately no financial deposit was needed.
So we have now left Snow Bear for a couple of weeks while we are visiting friends and relatives in Europe, on our return we will head for Nova Scotia.