9/6/2023 0 Comments Iceberg alley riesling![]() ![]() “If it’s sitting on the bottom it probably won’t roll,” says Miller, motioning towards the berg with one hand. A flat royal-blue tanker with a hole on top that has snow spilling out of it, it sits just outside a cove ringed by fir trees, perched next to a chunky iceberg that has angles like a cubist painting. Gliding over the black water, I see not only a seal pop its head up like a whack-a-mole out of an arcade game, but something even rarer: an iceberg harvester. On Bruce Miller’s Rugged Beauty Boat Tour, we gun through the water from New Bonaventure, a teeny town a 20-minute drive away from Trinity. Picture: GettyĮach tour teaches you something about the Newfoundlander ingenuity that has transformed the province, from being perceived in Canada as a cultural backwater (it only received paved roads in 1966) to a traveller’s holy grail: a place so pristine you feel you are perched on the edge of the earth, but with luxurious places to eat and sleep. Overlooking Iceberg Alley in the Atlantic Ocean. It is so-called because, from mid-May to mid-July every year, a natural flotilla of icebergs drift through it, pulled by the wind and the current, after breaking off from glaciers in Greenland. ![]() They’re offered in nearly every town that borders this treacherous part of the North Atlantic - not far from where the Titanic sank - called Iceberg Alley. This led to more than 30,000 people fleeing Newfoundland for work in other provinces.īut for the last 12 years or so, skippers like Curry have latched on to a breathtaking - and legal - way of surviving: iceberg tours. And decades of overfishing led the Canadian government to declare a moratorium on cod fishing, the province’s primary industry, in 1992. Poor topsoil has meant the province has little farming. Picture: AlamyĪ number of local Newfoundland fishermen apparently collaborated with “Teflon Don”, motivated by a steep payday, a difficult thing to knock back in what has long been the poorest province in Canada. The biggest drug bust in Canadian history in 1987, $225 million worth of hash smuggled here by a Montreal-based mafia head.Īn iceberg in Trinity Bay. So, a drug bust? In a deserted fishing village on the edge of the continent? It’s true, as it turns out. There you go: even more 10,000-15,000-year-old icy behemoths dotting the endless coastline. Look left, out to the ocean and past that iceberg no, not the one the height of a house that resembles the Sphinx, but the other one, with the flat top that shimmers like opal under the melting sun, and a steep side with the texture of crumpled paper. Look to the right, into a craggy little cove, and there’s little more than a few piles of wind-bleached timber, and a white wooden sign perched on a rock that says, “Ireland’s Eye: Population 0”. We are floating in a Zodiac, on the emerald green waters that fringe an uninhabited island, lying just off the north coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s easternmost province. ‘DID ya hear about the drug bust here?” says the skipper, Bob Curry, cocking his head towards mine, as we - OK, as I - wince against the lip-cracking winds whipping our faces. ![]()
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