Destination Dildo

Leaving South Dildo

OK, get your mind out of the gutter! There is, in fact, a community in Newfoundland named Dildo. Dildo was settled in the late 1700s but native Americans have lived here since 2000 BC. In 1613 Henry Crout came into contact with the native Beothuck indian tribe. So good on the people of Dildo for hanging on to their community name. The people of Fucking in Austria, no doubt, share the same snickers.

A dildo in fact (before its modern equivalent) was a peg inserted into the gunwale of a dory to lock the oars in place for rowing.

But, as the saying goes, I digress. Sunday Clyde, Dean, Tobias and I launched in Dildo South to paddle in the south end of Trinity Bay about an hour's drive from St. John's. A beautiful sunny day with no wind but excitement did lay in wait for us.

Wharves and stages

The community of Old Shop lies along the coast across the Arm from Dildo. This is so typical of outport Newfoundland where fishermen have built their our wharves and stages. Less so now but in bygone days fishermen would land their catch of cod on the wharf, carry it into the stage where it would be split, sound bone removed and salted.

No more houses

As we paddled up Dildo Arm we left the houses and wharves of Old Shop behind. It felt good to be out of the public eye.

Yellow on blue

The yellow boats of Dean and Tobias make an exclamation mark in an almost all blue picture. After rounding the point past Old Shop we left Dildo Arm and entered Spread Eagle Bay and started thinking about lunch.

The water was calm but we would find rougher stuff to play in.

Fine lines

She sure shows her fine lines in this shot looking up Spread Eagle Bay from our lunch beach.

Rollers

From our lunch beach we could see breaking waves on the point between Southern Spread Eagle and Spread Eagle. We ate our lunch in anticipation of getting out there to have a look. We weren't disappointed as the higher breaking waves reached heights of 3 metres beore toppling over. We stayed for about 30 minutes riding up and over the waves and occasionally getting trashed around by them.

Between a rock and a hard place

Just short of Southern Point in Spread Eagle Bay we ducked inside a sea stack before crossing over to Dildo Island.

Sawteeth

North of Dildo Island, land gave way to a spline of rocks that rose from the sea like the teeth of a saw. We stopped on Dildo Island as nature called and because we spotted breaking waves here we decided to go play some more. Too, Dean's GPS told us we'd paddled 14.5 kms to that point and we wanted to make the hour long drive worth our while. We needed at least 20.

Ride 'em cowboy

The grouping of rocks provided breaking waves. Getting caught on the largest of the set meant getting ridden onto the rocks about 3 metres up out of the picture just off to the right.

We played around here for a bit before paddling straight down Dildo Arm back to our put-in for a total distance of 23.5 kms. Not a bad piece of business on a beautiful day.