Resettlement

So back to the timeline. We were flying north to St. Anthony where we'd catch a ferry back down. The kilometers rolled by. We mandated breaks every 20 km to keep our fuel supply well stocked (by eating, that is), and this worked well.

135 km in, we stopped in Hawke's Bay to see if we could find out the schedule for the ferry. If it only ran once a week, that could throw a serious wrench in our plans. What we found out was even worse, however. The St. Anthony ferry no longer ran. Our suspicion was that the ferry from Labrador to Lewisporte (Newfoundland) stopped in St. Anthony, but after talking to the company itself, we realized no such thing took place.

Canada's Resettlement Program

Newfoundland has long been a one-industry island, and that industry has been codfish. The history is long and complicated, and we don't pretend to know that much about it, but we know the basics. Newfoundland almost incorporated as part of the United States after WWII, but ended up striking a better deal with Canada. Joey Smallwood negotiated the deal, and older Newfies still look up to him because they immediately saw benefits. Cash, pension plans, infrastructure deals, etc. But the codfish industry has been badly mismanaged by Canada, and in 1993, codfishing was entirely banned. It's only recently been opened back up, but has severe restrictions on it.

This all but destroyed the way of life and source of income in all the fishing communities scattered around the entirety of the Newfoundland coast. The ferry services that Canada had been subsidizing suddenly seemed a great burden, and they started looking for ways to "modernize." The government came up with resettlement. Move the families, house and home (literally move their houses, or buy them new ones), into the urban areas. This proved highly controversial, esp. since communities had to reach near consensus in order for it to take place. Communities were divided and there are stories of houses being burned down in order to reach the 98% agreement or consensus to resettle.

Other than being an interesting (though sad) chapter in Newfoundland's history, it is relevant to us for one reason: many of the ferries have stopped running.

With St. Anthony out of the picture, our last hope was to catch the ferry from Englee (eeng-LEE) and hug the coast down to Great Harbor Deep and Jackson's Arm.

Turns out, Great Harbor Deep is one of the few communities that actually resettled, and the ferry stopped running within the last year.

Wind Out of Sails

After clippping along so efficiently toward our goal, we found out this new info and, as you can imagine, we were suddenly completely emotionally deflated. We had no choice but to head for the next sizeable town, regroup, and figure out what to do.

This town turned out to be Port au Choix, and when we rounded the corner to head there, the emotional blow we took became physical: the wind turned against us. The last 20 km were eeked out at a crawling pace. We struggled up one of the steepest hills yet with a 25 km/hr headwind, and limped into town.

It was a grey and dark hellhole, Nick assures this ambiguously voiced blog writer, and we spent several cold hours debating what to do. Part of that time we wasted in a dreary pub that was empty but for two sad souls squandering their money on electronic slot machines. On one of the empty machines, we noticed a marquee scrolling across the screen giving advice to people with gambling addictions, which, though appropriately placed, seemed ridiculous and mocking.

We ended up camping on a peat bog (the picture you saw before), which took us a while to find and more time to push our bikes up to. Strange voices filtered our way--seemingly from children. With the sun just setting and the wind still full force, we checked our odometer for the day--remember we were trying to make 100 miles--and realized we were just short: 99 miles. The only silver lining was for Nick, who because of his trip back to camp that morning to recover his camera and iPod, made the century day with the extra 10 km he rode.

We we thwarted in our attempts to make a fire, so we cooked dinner on the camp stove and decided to give in to the ferry gods. We would go back down the way we came, and face the onslaught of wind.