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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Red Bay, Labrador

Today we are in Red Bay, Labrador, a former whaling station. The
whaling station has gone away, there are a number of small fishing
fleets are found in the area. We have yet to see any whales on the trip
but we saw our first iceberg this morning as you can see in the photo.
We thought that we saw a whale but noting that after an hour and a half
the disturbance in the water was in the same exact spot. Someone with
binoculars saw that it was a large submerged rock. Close but I am sure
that we will see whales as we proceed. We did see whales when we were
on our African cruise in 2007 as leaving the harbor in Cape Town, South
Africa.

I have found that the small town of Red Bay has a lot of two things:
black flies and cemeteries. The black flies are as thick as . . .
flies, I guess. A couple of folks from the ship was prepared for the
flies as they went ashore wearing thin net veils. The rest of ours were
not as lucky so we just swatted and cursed. As for cemeteries, although
this is a very small settlement, there are three cemeteries. One is
very old (19th century) and no longer used but the other two are still
used. As with most small settlements, two or three names are abundant
on the tombstones. Here the top two names seem to be Pike and Moore. I
talked to a young man (anyone younger than myself) at the heritage
center (another name for a genealogical center) he said that a large
numbers of Irish came to this part of Canada.

It is now about 5:15 PM and we will be leaving the port shortly. The
Captain announced that we should expect to see more icebergs as we leave
this area as we sailed to Greenland. Hope to get some photos. Tomorrow
is a day at sea and we won't be arriving in Nanortalik, Greenland.
That's it for now.

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