Red Bay to Saint Lewis (No not St. Lewis, MO) and Saint Lewis to Cartwright
August 10 – 11, 2018
From Red Bay, we followed the Trans-Labrador Highway (Route 510) through Lodge Bay, Mary’s Harbor, crossed on to Wood Island, and came to a fork in the road, and like Yoga Berra said, we took it, turning east onto route 513. We camped for the night in a lonely turnoff on route 513 and readied ourselves for the next day run into Saint Lewis, the end of the line.
But first, going back to our stay in Red Bay I want to talk about a visit to another Red Bay “hidden gem”, the Right Whale Exhibit Museum where the wayward traveler can study a 400 year old, 52-foot long skeleton of a North Atlantic Right Whale. This museum focuses on research about and protection of this magnificent creature. Some very focused and remarkable people are painstakingly reassembling this skeleton, mostly from actual bone from this particular whale, with some missing parts recreated using molded epoxy models. Tedious work indeed.
The North Atlantic Right Whale, averaging about 50 feet in length and weighing about 60 tons, is one of the most endangered whales in the world. There are less than 370 individuals in existence in the western North Atlantic Ocean, down from what almost assuredly was a population of thousands, pre European expansion.
Right Whales are docile” gentle giants” that migrate between feeding grounds in the Labrador Sea and their winter calving areas off Georgia and Florida, an ocean area with heavy shipping traffic. They are baleens. with plates of bone in their mouths like combs, that they employ to strain plankton from the water. A peaceful way to make a living. Is it not remarkable that one of the largest creatures in the ocean survives on one of the smallest?
Vessel strikes and entanglement in fixed fishing gear, account for nearly half of all North Atlantic right whale mortality since 1970.
Because of their docile nature, their slow, methodical surface-skimming feeding behaviors, their tendencies to stay close to the coast, and their high blubber content (which makes them float when they are killed, and which produced high yields of whale oil), all make right a preferred target for whalers. They were the “right whale” to take, the easy ones to take, the most profitable.
To see the skeleton of this grand leviathan and to think that only 370 individuals have survived the onslaught of human endeavor is a sad thing indeed. It makes me sad to contemplate the stark fact that human kind would let a noble creature like the North Atlantic Right Whale become extinct, for no other reason than we can’t change ship’s course and get the heck out of their way as they travel to their southern birthing grounds to make baby whales, an enterprise they have engaged in for hundreds of thousands of years.
What would we do if someone did that to us?
After our visit to Saint Lewis, we headed west, backtracking on 510 to rejoin the Trans-Labrador Highway and traveled 252 kilometers through broken Black Spruce forest to Port Hope Simpson (population 412), then to another fork in the road, and headed north to Muddy Bay (population 0) and Cartwright (population 427), another “end of the line” coastal settlement. As we travel westward, towns are getting fewer and smaller.
In Port Hope Simpson we met Catherine (Kattie) H. Brookskenyon, a magnificent seventy-five year old dame, from Delaware originally, now living in Arizona, traveling alone into the Labradorean wilderness, who got her master’s in social work from the Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, Virginia, the very same school I got a degree in pharmacy from in 1974. We were probably there together.
Small world indeed.
Kattie the “power” woman.
Onward north on Labrador 516 through Paradise River (population 14) to sub-arctic Cartwright (population 416) where the average mean temperature is 32 degrees F, and average snowfall is 6 feet, we buy groceries and look around a bit. A cold rain begins to fall so we backtrack again and drive almost all the way back to our junction with the Trans-Labrador Highway, where we pass a rather unpleasant night in a black fly infested road construction site. Black flies, the bane of many a Labrador traveler, sometimes attack in swarms, like the one tormenting us that night. Labrador is home to about thirty-five black fly species, mostly biters.
Turns out, every grocery store (and I use that term loosely), every gas station (few and far between) and every other place of business in Labrador are well stocked with black fly protection suits, nets that hang down from broad rimed hats, which friendly Labradoreans are happy to sell and which we were equally as happy to purchase.
From mid-July through mid-September, precisely when we were there, they can be pretty doggone bad. Bring plenty of BET, not that namby-pamby organic citronella stuff.