The capelin bounty

Beautiful Skerwink Trail

This month I have been living the Newfoundland Tourism adverts. The fickle jet stream that has brought flooding to England and dangerous heat to the US is sitting perfectly for us to enjoy 6 weeks of endless sunshine and steady 25-30C temperatures.

Summer in Open Hall

The rivers and lakes have warmed up to comfortable swimming temperature and last week the whales finally decided to join us in the sun. Every year, after the icebergs have flowed by and thawed, the Labrador current brings in its next haul: capelin.

Wish upon a star(fish)

John had told me about these fish but I had a hard time really imagining what I finally got to see a couple of weeks ago; hundreds of sleek, green foiled fish rolling up on the beach to spawn.

Capelin roll

The shore was as thick with their bodies we caught them in plastic shopping bags without getting our feet wet.

My kind of takeaway

It’s the capelin that bring in the whales and last week we walked the magnificent Skerwick Trail and watched Humpbacks snorting and puffing their way through their decedent feast.

Humpback feeding

Everything that eats capelin is glutted with them, including us! Even the seagulls sat around on the water to fat to bother. Sobaka was simply overwhelmed by the sight and stood in the water letting the fish run around paws and never moved so much as his ears. We tried to give him a fish or two but he apparently doesn’t like to eat anything that is still flapping. It’ll be fine when I have the dog team to net a few bags and freeze them up for winter feed. The big seiners were working all week to stock up and ship out to the Far East. The gardens in our neighbourhood had more than one drying rack set up. The capelin are that numerous people harvest them and dig them into their potato plots. They were fine eating just cooked fresh out the sea and I’m told the dried ones are a good snack, though I’m not so sure I’m a fan of fish jerky.
  

Sunset from the cabin deck

Sometimes I have to step back and realise it is only 6 weeks since John got home. I say that because then I realise we have taken on a lot and all in all are doing none too bad when it sometimes feels like we’ve done nothing but be grumpy with each other. As most of you know I got to spend the sum total of 5 weeks with him last year and I moved here just before Christmas to be with him, only he left on 2 January, was home for 10 days in March and didn’t make it back again until June.  With the summer tourist season already upon us, there is every urgency to get his holiday cottages finally finished and operating so instead of at long last having some time to just hang out and be together, we’ve been trailing furniture and hardware stores buying everything from loo brushes to radios. I can tell you pillows, pillow protectors, bed bug cases, mattress protectors, sheets and duvets for 4 queen size beds take up a lot of volume in a car and the dog was perched atop it all like the princess and her pea.

I'm a giant!

I remember when my ex and I bought our first house us joking that if you can hang ceiling paper together and not kill each other, then you should be ok. Well, clearly the ceiling paper challenge wasn’t quite enough for us, so this time we’ve put the DIY challenge on steroids. Aside from completely furnishing two cottages, we are doing what we can to tidy up the long neglected house in St John’s.



Sunset champagne at the cabin

John came back from Gabon to an empty house because I had a friend visiting and we were out at the cabins. I should not have left him unsupervised, not even for one night. The week before, in an effort to restore his sprawling garden which he hadn’t even seen for several summers, I had tidied up all the weeds, mown the lawn and dug in and planted out a new border. He was inspired. I got back to find he had chopped down all the trees and was trying to burn them in the woodstove, sending up so much smoke the neighbour came running to see if the house was on fire. Over the next 2 week he tried to convince me he could burn everything up in ‘the gorilla’, his pet name for his shed stove which ‘eats everything’, only he hasn’t been home for summer for years and had forgotten that when it warms up people like to use their washing line and keep windows open. The opportunities to burn were few. With the garden impassable, I put my foot down and we ordered a skip.

Happy Sobaka

There are some things you can feel coming from a mile away and there seems nothing you can do to make it otherwise. I knew, just knew, my container from Scotland would arrive before all the furniture for the cabins was moved out of the front room. And I was right.  John was still ripping out the old kitchen so we could shoehorn my life possessions into the last available space while I was down at customs signing off all the documentation. My things arrived 2 hours later and the lorry that was due to take the furniture out to the cabins did not. I was too frazzled to take a photo of the house in the middle stage of this chaos, but you’ve all seen those images of the UN food depots at times of crisis. That’s pretty representative.  

The lorry turned up 7am next day and we got all the cabin furniture loaded up in a couple of hours then spent the rest of the day filling up the dump and by evening had half restored order and some elbow room though the old kitchen is still piled high with my boxes.

John throwing the cast net for capelin

It is a good thing that we’ve had a lot of visitors in the last 6 weeks because this has been our excuse to take a break. Unlucky Laura got the one week of terrible weather we’ve had since April with fog so thick she could barely see across the road and driving rain to go with it. We hiked in the woods anyway and it finally let up for the Skerwink Trail, but otherwise it was truly foulest weather a la The Shipping News. However, we did go iceberg hunting and found the last of the season and finally netted her the moose sighting she’d been denied her whole year in Canada.

Last iceberg of spring

The morning she left we climbed Signal Hill early to get her to the airport by 11 for her journey back to the UK. The sun came out on the summit and by afternoon John and I were sunbathing in the garden and wishing she could have stayed just a day longer to see it.

Signal Hill above St John's

Above Trinity on the Skerwink Trail

Frances is the Manager for the cabins and she and her son Cody came to stay to sort out his university courses and get yet more shopping done for the cabins. Finally everyone had enough of shopping in the heat and we went for an extremely fun afternoon zip lining over Petty Harbour and enjoyed the awesome views instead.  

Ziplining fun

Next up was John’s sister Doreen. She got the only 2 days of rain we’d had since Laura left. By then they were badly needed with hosepipe bans in place and the forest fire risk on the rise, but it was a bummer she didn’t get the sunshine either. The arrival of the capelin made up for the rain though and we had BBQ anyway for her and our friends in Open Hall to celebrate the fact that John was finally home for summer and Doreen was over.

It seems like the sun was sticking its nose up at Doreen. We drove back from Open Hall in great weather only to deliver her to the airport on Sunday. When we went to collect Rudy and HyoJoo on Monday the sunscreen was back on and the high temperatures never left us all week. We had a brilliant week hiking, swimming, whale watching, capelin fishing, BBQ, a meal at a Korean restaurant in town, teaching HyoJoo questionable Newfie slang and rounded it off with a brilliant short play – Sherlock Holmes rewritten to be set in the 17^thC candlelight wine cellar all 40 of us in the audience were sitting in.   John of course remembers one line in particular, where Sherlock tells a woman she is “a Troubleist”.

Goofy moose

Somewhere in the middle of this running around we managed to see a movie, eat with the neighbours, walk the dog, paint the deck, oh and forward the cafe plans. And, brilliantly, John bought a raffle ticket and won top prize so we have 2 days guided salmon fishing on the Conne River. Only trouble is the unusual summer has just resulted in a ban on salmon fishing because water levels are too low, temperature is too high and the salmon aren’t migrating to spawn.

Now, the cafe I have been asked about a lot. And we still plan to go ahead, but we’ve had to wheedle a special permission concession from the planning boss to be allowed to buy the land so now that is done, we can proceed and we are looking forward to doing just that. More importantly, Al and Linda managed to safely ship a giant cookie jar of the hare from Alice in Wonderland which will somehow or other become the cafe centrepiece. James suggest I call the cafe The Polar Hare.  

Looking back to Open Hall

So as I said, we’ve had more than a few spats, but all in all we are doing ok. I sit back and realise we are trying to make up for very little time together, learn to live together, redo one house, completely furnish two others, start a business with all that entails (website, logos, fire safety inspections, tourism inspections, undless unpacking and putting furniture together etc), train a puppy, work and have a good time. It’s not all roses, but it’s been a pretty darn good summer and start to life here in Canada.

Thanks to Laura, Rudy, HyeJoo and Doreen for the photos :)