 Newfoundland lives - and dies - with the Sea. Without counting Labrador, the isle of Newfoundland alone boasts over 15,000 km of shoreline. Long before Vikings and Basque fishers "discovered" its rugged landscape, these shores were already supporting human life. Sadly, industrial overfishing has destroyed the sea floor. Long thought to be inexhaustible, the Sea has stopped bringing life to those it fed for so long. The coastal fishers and their families are leaving their villages in order to find work, "away"...
Once punctuated with fishing villages and isolated outports, the Southwestern shore of Newfoundland not only offers recent traces of this traditional way of life but still preserves some of its villages.
Over the 200 km separating Rose-Blanche from Hermitage, as the crow flies, the only road access to the coast is in Burgeo. Taking advantage of a break in the fog that covered the area for a good part of the Summer, we explored the most exposed half of that coastline. Although it lasted only 5 days, this paddling expedition took us on a roller coaster ride across the lines of time, filling our minds with breath taking images and tearing our souls with the daily drama of a people losing its traditional way of life.
In Port-aux-Basques, at the end of our trip, not long before leaving on the ferry back to Nova Scotia, we stroke a conversation with a young man, just graduated from high school. We asked him what he was going to do next. "Going away", was his answer, "nothing here, except rocks and seagulls...". Here is what we found, between rocks and seagulls.
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