Saturday, July 12

Today, Sophia and Aaron, two other QLF workers, and I went crab fishing at 3 AM. Riley, the captain of the boat, is one of our most dedicated observers. He has great documentation of whales and often sends it to Trish. With this documentation, she is compiling an atlas of the concentration of whale species in the Lower North Shore, southern Labrador, and western Newfoundland. Two fishermen greeted us at the docks with cooked snails. I tasted one, and it was enough. It took 2 1/2 hours to get to the crab pots. We watched the fishermen load the boat with fresh snow crab. Each line had 25 pots attached, and there were a total of 125 pots. It took them 5 hours to collect every pot. Next we went to Middle Bay, a tiny community of 31 people. Towns like these are suffering in the Lower North Shore because much of the fishing industry has decreased after the near depletion of the cod industry in the early 1990s. After the fish plant weighed the day's catch, we went back to Blanc Sablon to sightsee. We saw harbour porpoises, a seal, a few humpback whales, and puffins.