Tuesday 25 July - Fourche Harbour

Rowed to shore, and took a trampled path leading round to the head of the cove. After a while, realized it wasn’t a human path (no humans here, bar me), but a moose path - confirmed by large squelches of moose poo at intervals. Reminded me of the game I’ve played with my grandchildren, being chased by various wild animals - checked over my shoulder, you know, just in case. (There were also enormous heaps of giant - and I mean giant - rabbit droppings - you can tell me now what huge animal produced these.)

PS Found out later the monster rabbit poos are moose, the others ... BEARS??

That really would begoing on a bear hunt ...

On the way back, I realized the neatly trimmed bushes were at moose mouth height.
Rowed to the end of the cove, instead, where there was a graveyard moated by a fast flowing stream. There are Hynes, Parsons and lots of Randalls. The stones are new and white, unweathered - but the dates are from the 60s and earlier, so they have been replaced. It’s overgrown, but tended periodically. And all the headstones have their backs to the water.
There are millions of tiny flies, rubbed from my eyes, scratched from my hair, spat from my mouth and excavated from my ears. And they bite - I’m now covered in itchy lumps. Back at the dinghy, I stripped and waded into the shallows - not deep enough to swim, so several rather freezing dunks instead. There is a boulder garden at this end of the bay, so returning to the boat, I row facing forwards.
We left at about 11 am - sunny, with flukey winds. In the other arm of Fourche are the rusting remains of Newfoundland’s last whaling station. We sail past this now peaceful place, then turn and head out to sea.
Off Canada Bay, further up the coast, a pod of dolphins come and inspect us. They stay for quite a while, urging us to play, but we’re not much fun, and they leave us in search off other games.
Cape Fox (?Faux) and Cape Rouge ahead - on the chart, they are two huge lumps of land stuck on to the mainland. They are made of entirely different rock to the pinky gray high rounded hills of the coast (which remind me of a range of domed elephant skulls). The rock of these capes is reddish-brown sedimentary layers, slanting skywards at 45 degrees and more, jagged, with no ice age smoothing. As we go along Cape Fox, the land is stepped like Mayan pyramids, crowned in grass, and smacked with guano from the herring gulleries. Coloured like the old Newfoundland flag - green, white and pink.
We turn into Cape Rouge Bay - a wider expanse of water compared with others we’ve visited. We anchor off La Biche, some way inside, passing a summer fishing outport of around 10 houses. As Jack drops the anchor, the wind starts to howl out of the south west. Now, indeed, when’s it’s not wanted! Rain all night, poor forecast, food thinning out …