After a week indulging ourselves in France, we were off to explore the Burin Peninsula. Our first stop was St. Lawrence, a town I’ve always wanted to visit ever since hearing this:

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1149406

on National Public Radio years ago. There’s a museum in town that tells the story even more dramatically than the radio piece. There are photographs of the disaster and subsequent heroism taken by a young girl with her Brownie camera. The US Navy tried to confiscate the photos but the girl stood firm. The other focus of the museum is on the struggles of the miners to be treated fairly by the company. The men went into the mines knowing they would die painfully before the age of 40 of silicosis or radiation poisoning. They went on strike asking for more than 23 cents/hour and for death benefits for their families. There’s a wonderful photograph in the museum of the whole lot of them on the day they managed to win a few concessions.

We spent the next day in the town of Burin where we were the first visitors this year. The docks were full of fishing boats so we tied up alongside one which wasn’t going out any time soon. The town and surrounding areas were once known for ship building. The Spurrier family built schooners around there for three generations until the great grandson Christopher, a “notorious wastrel and gambler” ran the business into bankruptcy, putting hundreds out of work. The town hasn’t fully recovered yet.

We continued up Placentia Bay to the abandoned island outport of Oderin, pronounced O’Derin, originally Audierne. There’s a perfect small harbor protected from winds of any direction and surrounded by hills paved with thick mosses and dotted with spruce, berries and wild flowers. We had the whole island all to ourselves, save for the hearts and souls of those who were “resettled” elsewhere. We may have been the first humans to visit the island this year. Oderin is as scenic and peaceful a place as you could possibly imagines that’s where we decided to turn around, stop heading east and begin our return.

We headed back toward Burin, seeing some of the same whales and dolphins we saw the day before.It’s always a pleasure to be paid a visit by our fellow mammals of the sea. Anchored in Little Burin Harbour, we spent the rainy afternoon with our large collection of books.

Saturday,in bright sunshine, we continued down the peninsula to the rarely visited town of Lamaline. There was no reason to go ashore so I did some work on the bits of teak that were in need of revarnishing. France was clearly visible a few miles offshore but we resisted that temptation.

On Sunday we waited for the showers to end then sailed around the bottom of the peninsula and back up the west side to the town of Grand Bank. It was a fine sunny afternoon with light winds and flat water but no whales, no dolphins, no seals. We did see another sailboat returning from France. That makes five that we’ve now seen in Newfoundland. There’s plenty of room for all of us. We’ve not had to share an anchorage yet.