Diane
It was seriously foggy in Bonavista this morning, but we had a puffin and whale tour to get to at 10am. So, off we went in hopes of seeing some of each. The boat slithered through the shallow swells out of the harbor until we were out at the edge next to the Bonavista lighthouse. It was nasty enough weather that the fog horn kept sounding, and any puffins or whales needed to be pretty close to the boat to be seen.
At one point the captain of the boat circled around four small birds sitting in the water, so I assumed those must have been puffins. The guy who kept going up and down from one level to the other of the boat and keeping an eye out for the desired wildlife said that puffins have the orange beaks only when it’s mating season. I guess that’s all over already, since I didn’t see any orange. Val swears she saw several puffins, but if she did, I missed them. Absolutely no whales.
So, our wildlife count is now 2 rabbits, 1 eagle, 1 mink, and a couple squirrels. There was also a fox later in the day, along with a few more puffins when we went to a place known to have quite a few nesting there. None of us can remember what it’s called. However, there were at least some puffins. Yeah!
We also stopped at the Sealers Museum, which was a small but very well done display about the large, commercial seal hunting industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s hard to imagine jumping off a ship and scrambling around on moving plates of ice, hopping from one to another to find a group of seals. Falling into the water was a problem, naturally, but so was having the ship get caught in the ice so that you couldn’t get out of the area. There were two really bad accidents in 1914 when one ship disappeared completely with about 175 men and another lost about 50 people when its two captains miscommunicated with one another. Each thought the group of 50 had been picked up off the ice by the other ship. It’s certainly a hardscrabble life in Newfoundland.
I hope you shipped those chairs home!