Wednesday, - August 1, 2007

Wow, the summer is half over – hope everyone is enjoying it. I talked to Mike last night and he said it is very hot in Kitchener, so I guess we won’t complain as it is just pleasant temperature wise here. I woke up this morning to see sun shining – we were really excited.

We left about 10 and went and picked up our tickets for the Western Brook Pond Tour and headed up. Western Brook is a land locked fjord surrounded by mountains and has an average depth of 155 meters and the water is very clear and pristine - definitely one of Western Newfoundland’s treasures. There are 2 tour boats and the smaller one was brought in by snowmobile on a flatbed over the frozen bog in the winter, the other was flown in by helicopter in four separate pieces then put together at their boathouse.

It is a 3 km walk into get the boat (so it is 3 km back after the boat tour) so we gave ourselves lots of time to walk in. The trail was good, fairly easy walking and there was lots of interesting information about the bogs, the wildflowers etc. on the way. When we got to the dock we bought a hot dog and by the time we had eaten it the two tour boats had come back so it was time to line up. We were lucky and got to sit up top, only one boat had the top deck so we were glad we had gotten there early. Just as the boat was pulling away from the dock there were a number of moose crossing at the narrows and John managed to get a good picture of them. Although it was misty on the tops of the mountains basically the view was beautiful and we really enjoyed it. We couldn’t believe the number of waterfalls we saw - the names of the two of the large ones were Blue Denim and Pissing Mare. We also saw the result of a large rock slide which occurred in 1994, apparently there was a tour boat there when it happened – that would be quite exciting!! On the way back the wind had picked up and it was quite cold as the boat was heading directly into the wind, but shortly before docking the sun came out and the sky cleared.

On the way home we stopped to see what was left of the S. S. Ethie, a coastal steamer that ran aground during a vicious storm in December 1919. All 92 passengers and crew were saved and one baby was sent ashore in a mailbag. There is still a lot of debris laying on the beach and part of the boiler is in the water, it is very rocky and rough there, it would have been a terrifying experience!!

We also stopped at Lobster Cove Lighthouse on the way back and toured through there. You need a National Park pass to go in the lighthouse and seeing how we had to buy a pass to do the boat tour we thought we might as well use it for something else.

The couple next door have just invited us over for a drink so I will close this off real fast.