Concertina on the South Coast of Newfoundland, 23 July 2006


Four weeks along the South Coast of Newfoundland aboard the “Concertina” from mid-July to mid-August 2006.
Sunday, 23 July 2006	Cinc Island Bay to Bay l'Argent; We are impressed with the wisdom of local knowledge.

	Early morning was foggy and flat calm but was soon transformed to light easterlies with rain showers. These conditions continued more or less all day with fog filling in when it wasn’t raining. The Yanmar ran for much of the day punctuated by short periods of attempting to beat to windward when we thought we had breeze enough. The helmsman’s pose says it all!
	The ferryboat connecting Poole’s Cove, Rencontre East and Bay l’Argent passed by heading westward while Peter dubiously eyed the cameraman. Outside of Bay l'Argent, we sited two large whales.

On approaching Bay l’Argent around 1600 hours we slowly gained a visibility of about a mile allowing us to make out the shape of the harbour’s headlands.
	On our third attempt at it we finally got the anchor to hold in the cove off the town just east of the ferry dock.
	We had a look around ashore and eventually met Sheldon and his father Eric Banfield who helped us out in many ways during our short stay in Bay l’Argent. He welcomed us into his home where Peter could place some essential phone calls to arrange for his return to Cape Breton from Argentia by ferry. Eric urged us to tie up alongside his wharf just astern of his fishing vessel. We seemed secure on our anchor and chose to pass on his kind offer.
	The wisdom of Eric’s offer became clear to us at 0130 hours on Monday morning as we found the schooner to be dragging out of the cove in the face of extremely forceful southerly blasts funneling through the low opening behind the town and right into the harbour cove. So as it turned out, we did tie up securely to Eric’s wharf in the middle of that night.

Saturday, 22 July 2006	return to log index	Monday, 24 July 2006