Long Hard Road to Cape Chidley
After a major overhaul during the summer of 2003, our 50-foot FD-12 cutter Brendan’s Isle was ready in June 2004 for another adventure. But where to point her bows? I knew I wanted to head north toward Newfoundland, for I had just finished writing a new book about that island, due to be published in mid-September, and I wanted to deliver preview copies to the dozens of Newfoundland fishermen and outporters who had shared their stories with me and who had become voices in the book.
But after eight summer voyages to Newfoundland, that island had become something of a familiar destination. Why not head farther north, I thought, and try for a truly challenging destination that had eluded Brendan’s Isle in the past? My crew and I could stop on the homeward leg to deliver books and visit old friends in northern Newfoundland. But on the outbound leg, why not attempt to traverse the eight hundred mile coast of eastern Labrador and set our sights on its northernmost extremity at Cape Chidley?
Twice in previous years my crews and I had tried to sail to Cape Chidley, and twice we had been denied. The first attempt had been in 1991, a year that eventually turned out to have the heaviest sea ice concentrations and the longest sea ice season along the Labrador coast of any year since the beginning of modern record-keeping. The second attempt had been in 1994, when Brendan and her crew had sailed to western Greenland. Our plan that year had been to circle back toward northern Labrador late in the summer when most of the sea ice would have been dispersed. However, during a late August crossing of the Davis Strait, a powerful storm system drove us south, forcing Brendan to take shelter in an uncharted cove in one of the deep fjords in Labrador’s mountainous Tourngat region, about 100 miles south of Cape Chidley. By the time the storm subsided, it was too late in the season to turn north and try to retrace our steps—so that once again Cape Chidley eluded us.
And thus it was that the plan for summer 2004 was hatched. The ship’s company, I soon discovered, would not include my favorite sailing partner and lifelong helpmate, Kay, for as she was quick to informed me, she had had enough in previous summers of roving icebergs and clouds of black flies and voracious mosquitoes the size of small birds. Besides, she had already planned a busy summer of her own back on the farm in Maryland. So, instead, I set out to find a crew of hardy young adventurers whom I could train on the series of passages from the eastern seaboard of the U.S. to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, trusting that once we had traversed the Strait of Belle Isle and had pointed our bows north in earnest, they would be seasoned sailors, accustomed to the boat and its idiosyncrasies, prepared for the inevitable surprises in store for them.
The crew that eventually assembled for this adventure—two young men and two young women—were as good as any I have ever sailed with. All were in their twenties; all had at least a modicum sailing experience (along with plenty of experience living in small groups under expeditionary conditions). The oldest of the group, Jess Rice, had been a NOLS instructor for the past six years, leading small groups on wilderness expeditions throughout the far west. The youngest, Will Barker, was the son of longtime CCA members Dev and Jilda Barker, whose summer residence at Boulaceet Farm (overlooking Maskill’s Harbor on Cape Breton Island) became our unofficial “home away from home” during our passages north and south through the Bras D’Or Lakes. The other two crew members, Bess Koffman and Eric Nemitz, were both graduates of Carleton College, both geology majors and teachers in outdoor education settings, both experienced sailors. Surely, I thought, with this kind of man- (and woman-) power on board, Brendan’s Isle should have no trouble completing the proposed four-week dash from the Strait of Belle Isle to the wilds of Cape Chidley and back again.
In the beginning, and in spite of our serious time constraint, I actually imagined that this plan might have a chance for success. The weather for the passage from Cape Cod to Cape Breton Island was near-perfect, and three and a half days after leaving the American coast, we were clearing Canadian customs at St. Peter’s Lock. Three days later, after a brief stop in the village of Baddeck for reprovisioning and minor repairs, Brendan was rolling across the Cabot Strait with a strong southeasterly on the quarter. Less than two days after this she had traversed the entire eastern Gulf of St. Lawrence and was pulling into the anchorage at Red Bay, Labrador.
From here the weather turned downright balmy, with day after day of warm (60 F plus) temperatures and light winds. On the journey north, which was accomplished at least half the time under diesel power, we saw plenty of icebergs and occasional bergy bits and other iceberg detritus, but we encountered no sea ice anywhere along the route. For days on end the sun shone brightly from nearly cloudless skies. The stark and treeless hills of southern Labrador, still covered with snow patches in early July, slowly gave way to the mountainous terrain of the mid-coast region. We traveled only during daylight hours, for in spite of the absence of sea ice, there were enough bergs moving southward along “iceberg alley” to present a serious danger to a fiberglass boat such as ours. But by getting underway each morning at first light and moving northward along the narrow track of charted soundings known as the “route usually followed,” we were able to assemble daily passages of sixty, seventy, eighty miles and more, moving about as fast as a boat of our type can reasonably be expected to travel through bergy water and along a poorly charted coast.
The first indication that our sailing plan might have been just a bit optimistic came one afternoon toward the end of the second week in July. Moving under power across glassy seas, Brendan had just doubled a stark and sometimes onerous headland called Cape Harrison, about a hundred miles north of the village of Cartwright, in one of the loneliest sections of Labrador’s mid-coast. Suddenly we raised the silhouette of a sailing yacht moving out from under the lee of the cape—the first yacht we’d seen since leaving Battle Harbor nearly a week before. The sailboat’s hull was white, with a spoon bow, cruising deckhouse, double spars. A quick call on the VHF radio confirmed what we had all suspected: it was CCA member (and Labrador Cruising Guide editor) Sandy Weld aboard his beautiful Alden ketch Windigo.
“Where’re you headed?” I asked, once we had made radio contact.
“Nain by the end of next week,” said Sandy.” Then, if the weather holds, maybe Cape Chidley by sometime in early August.”
Early August—was this a realistic timetable? (I thought, but didn’t say.) If it
was, then the cruise plan I had devised was in serious jeopardy, for I needed to be all the way back down in northern Newfoundland, delivering books, by early August!
That evening, Brendan’s Isle and Windigo lay at anchor in Rogers Harbor, rafted side by side in one of the most beautiful and secluded little gunkholes on the entire Labrador coast. During the evening, I continued talking timetables with Sandy. By that time I had taken a hard look at my charts again, measured off distances, and realized that I still had nearly five hundred miles of coast to travel with just over a week’s time before I would need to turn around.
Somewhat sheepishly, I admitted during an evening gam in Windigo’s main saloon that perhaps my initial goal had been unrealistic. Sandy smiled. During Windigo’s previous travels on the Labrador, he said, she had not yet made it to Cape Chidley either—only time would tell whether she would achieve this elusive goal in the coming weeks.
During the next few days Brendan and her crew began to slow their northbound pace. There was still no wind, and rather than just gritting our collective teeth and pushing ahead under power toward some arbitrary turn-around point, we decided to begin exploring some of the intricacies of the coast we were presently visiting and savoring its stark beauty. We continued moving north for several more days, exploring poorly charted thorofares, pausing for a photo-shoot with a wayward iceberg, and (somewhat surprisingly) sharing anchorages with Windigo on the next two succeeding evenings. Finally, however, the day of reckoning arrived. After a brief provisioning stop in the tiny Inuit settlement of Hopedale, we motor-sailed one more day north, finally pulling up in a remote fiord called Shoal Tickle, just a few miles south of Cape Harrigan in fifty-five degrees north latitude. The high terrain in this dramatic anchorage invited climbing. A frigid stream and a series of pools and waterfalls held out the promise of (cold!) bathing.. Caribou tracks were scattered about the rock-strewn beaches, and the tiny unnamed island in the middle of the fjord was crowned with a ptarmigan’s nest.
Should we stop and just enjoy this place for a day, I asked my crew? Or should we try to gain one more day of northing by pushing across another sixty miles of open water toward the Nain archipelago?
“Why not let the wind decide,” said Will. “If it’s blowing when we wake up tomorrow, then let’s go for a sail. But if leaving here and moving farther north just means another long motor-sail with the diesel engine roaring in our ears, then I vote for a day of climbing and exploring.” The others—all except Jess—nodded in agreement.
Next morning the dawn broke clear and crisp without a ripple of wind on the surface of the fjord, and I knew that our decision had been made. Here we would stay for at least a day—perhaps longer if an approaching weather system with strong northerlies were to materialize as forecast.
“Is this it, then?” asked Jess during a private moment later that morning. There was a clear note of disappointment—almost dejection—in her voice. “Is this as far north as we go? Does sailing to Cape Chidley really just mean sailing to some anonymous fjord on a deserted coast a hundred miles from nowhere?”
I didn’t respond for several seconds, for I too was feeling the same vague sense of disappointment, as if this whole enterprise had failed, as if all the miles we’d traveled had somehow become tainted and dishonest. And then I looked up at a bulkhead just behind Jess’s shoulder, at a picture frame containing the paraphrase of a poem called Ithaka that had been mounted there ever since Brendan’s Isle had been built. The poem, written by the Greek poet C.F. Cavafy, had been placed there twenty years before to remind me, and all who looked upon it, of why we sail to places like Cape Chidley—indeed, why we make any of the journeys we do in our lives.
I pointed to the small black frame and asked Jess if she would read the words. She paused, then read aloud:
As you set out for Ithaka
Ask that your journey be long and hard and full of adventure.
Along the way keep Ithaka always in your mind.
But do not hurry the journey at all—
Better if it lasts for many years.
When you arrive, wise and full of experience,
You’ll find her poor, with not much left to give you.
No, she’ll have nothing to give you,
For she will have given the voyage,
And that, as you now must surely understand, is something;
That is enough.
“Cape Chidley has given us the voyage,” I said, looking hard into Jess’s eyes to see if she understood.
“Cape Chidley has given you and Brendan three voyages,” said Jess. “With luck, some day, it may give you a fourth.”
“That is something I fervently wish,” I said.
Then Jess and I and our three fine shipmates set about the long and hard and adventurous business of sailing this old boat almost two thousand windward miles back home again.
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