Looking Back in Bonavista

2030 Tuesday, August 22, 2023

I have before mentioned that my first time sailing this coast was in 1977 aboard the barkentine Regina Maris in 1977. The vessel is shown above in a photo from that year. Today, we stayed in Bonavista to explore ashore. Back in 1977 the inshore cod fishery was still going. Today it is all but gone. It changed everything about life in Atlantic Canada.

Today we visited some beautiful spots along this coast including collapsed sea caves and a puffin colony. We also visited and climbed the historic Bonavista lighthouse at the tip of the cape.

We also visited the Ryan Premises, a Parks Canada site that consists of the preserved mercantile buildings where fishermen used to sell their cod for 200 years. The old "store" buildings are white with red trim, of immense size to store product. Nearby is a small cod flake, the wooden platforms where salted cod was dried in the air and sun. Harbors on this cost were filled with dozens and dozens and dozens of small outport communities where the shores were absolutely packed with fish flakes for drying cod. Old photos give a sense of the size and scale of that old cod fishery. A fishery that was feeding Canada, the United States, southwestern Europe, the Caribbean and more.

How do we care for our oceans going forward? Looking back, back through how things have changed since my first visit to Newfoundland and Labrador, looking back to the centuries before, raises questions about the sea and the lives of those around it.

Today we also bid farewell to our new friends from Hobart on their sailboat.

The photos and captions below touch on these aspects of our day.

Bill

Two views of the stunning coasts of the Bonavista peninsula.

The Bonavista Lighthouse and its rate light system.

The Ryan Premises and a small sample of a fish flakes for drying salted cod.

Two old views from the 20th century of fish flakes in Newfoundland outports.

Fishing continues today with a very small commercial quota. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s the fishing technology was reaping huge catches, peaking at 800,000 tons of cod per year. Now, the total allowed quota for commercial cod is just 12,000 tons. If my math is right, that is just 1.5% of the peak years. nobody could find cod back in 1992. They have been waiting 31 years for the fishery to recover. Nobody knows if it will ever recover.

We ate both lunch and dinner ashore today. one spot we liked was the Quintal Cafe. The name comes from an old cod fishing term. The common unit of measure for salted cod was in quintals. One quintal was equal to 8 British stone, or 112 pounds. Old scales seen on this coast have counterweights of 56 pounds, or half a quintal. Another old term forbworkingbwith cod was a "yaffke." A yaffle was a full armload of split, dried cod.

We said goodbye to our new friends, Kim and Ian aboard Astrolabe. She cleared the harbor and made her way out to sea, as we will do tomorrow.