2 October 2019, Wednesday

O and I wait all night for the rain to come. It doesn’t begin until near 6 am. It’s not much of a rain, but for a little while it comes down hard. When we are ready to get up for breakfast we check Wglwof’s floor – dry! We’ll need a bit more of a rain to be fully confident in our repair, but the results are encouraging.

After breakfast and showers we are on the road to Lunenburg, just over an hour away. Lunenburg is famous as an example of a planned colonial town. It is built on a steep slope down to the harbour. The buildings are brightly painted, and many of them are now shops, restaurants and inns. It’s a great place to wander, but our true objective is to see the Bluenose II, a replica of the famous fishing and racing schooner of the first half of the twentieth century, commemorated on the flip side of Canadian dimes and memorialized in Stan Rogers’ stirring song. Lunenburg is her home port. We’ve missed the time of year when tours are allowed by just a few days, but it’s still a thrill to see her.

Our next goal is finding food. We have an excellent dinner and two excellent local brews at the Grand Banker Seafood Restaurant and Pub. I have paella and O samples another version of fish cakes and beans. After eating we walk over to the Bluenose II Company Store to browse. In the shop we watch a video on the history of the Bluenose. The schooner was built in 1920-21 after a Lunenburg schooner lost a race with an arch rival from Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1920. The Canadians knew they had to come up with a special fishing schooner that would help them claim the title of fastest schooner in the next competition. The new Bluenose was captained by Angus Walters. Together schooner and captain won the competition for the next 18 years until the race was discontinued due to increasing tensions associated with the onset of WWII.

After our visit to the Bluenose Store we move on to the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic where we learn about the very hard life of the fishermen and of the currents and geography that make these fishing grounds so productive. The Grand Banks used to be coastal plains, but were submerged after the melting of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. The convergence of the St. Lawrence Current, the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream bring in a mix of nutrients that support abundant fisheries, or at least used to, before overfishing caused the collapse and closure of the cod fishery in 1992.

Now- back to Keji where we enjoy a dessert of Newfoundland chocolates before bedtime.