Newfoundland, Part 4, Conclusion

First of all, we boarded ship with about 30 other passengers at O’Brien’s Boat Tours for a two-hour ride on the Atlantic in search for whales and puffins. Back at St. Johns, the manager at our boarding house had told us, “You’ve seen more of Newfoundland than a lot of Newfoundlanders have.” Really? Well, if so, we were bound to see a little more.

ruins at St. Johns

Our boating guide, O’Brien, was a 40-year veteran of the business, a jolly Irish singer and musician who, when not joking around or singing some traditional Irish song, was an excellent source of information on the fish and birds and mammals of the North Atlantic.

gannet

bird-covered isle

I had never seen so many birds in one location. We approached a rocky isle considered to be the summer home for the second largest puffin colony in the world. “There’s probably two million puffins nesting there and flying all around us. If you haven’t seen a puffin yet, I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to help you!”

a few puffins

I heard another voice proclaim, “It’s like in the movie, The Birds!” But no– those puffins, murres, gulls, and fulmars flying all around us weren’t an evil omen. They were an event. Perfect shadows of interior life, as well as real lives of the North Atlantic waters.

from a shipwreck

Farther out on the misted ocean we began to see the spouts of feeding humpback whales. Water fountained from the wild, and then a breaching giant, and there– a diving cetacean with its tail straight up in air!

As if the whales were not enough, hungry dolphins began to school adjacent to our idled boat. The dolphins leapt into the air, slamming their bodies to the surface of the waves in efforts to corral their prey, the small fish known as capelin. Even O’Brien was amazed. “In my 40 years of guiding, I don’t think I’ve seen such dolphin energy!”

As we motored back to shore, our navigator cut the engine and O’Brien had us gather around. Now what? Well, Alyssa had secretly bought a special ceremony. We hardly qualified for honorary induction into Newfoundlander citizenship, but O’Brien announced to everyone that the three Americans were about to be “Screeched-In,” like it or not.

Thankfully there wasn’t any cod aboard for the traditional lip-kiss with a fish, or a rubber puffin with a butt to smooch. But there were yellow fishermen hats to wear, and there were plastic cups for highly potent screech (symbolic of the rotgut liquor that islanders once obtained from Jamaica, in quantity rather than quality, in trade for their barrels of local fish). And there was an oath of loyalty to the province that each of us repeated, line for line, with difficult Cockney accent, followed by hearing out O’Brien’s warning: the rum is bad; gulp it quickly with one swallow!

Then, screech it to the world! “Is you a Newfoundlander?”

“Yes b’y!”

Each of us then worthy of a signed certificate.

And the big surprise? The swill wasn’t bad at all. In fact, it was smooth and rich and not too sweet. Like travel through a wonderful land.

the Finish!