One night on Kellys Island (Part 2)

In part 1 Cathy, Gary and I left Long Pond for Kellys Island where we set up the tents and left some of our gear before paddling the 5 kms to Bell Island to explore.

We paddled over to "The Bell" which took us further away making the bee line paddle back to Kellys a longish crossing of 6.5 kms.  The wind had picked up and without working at all we did the crossing in 60 minutes.  Then it was time to try and catch our supper.

For my friends who are not Newfoundlanders, a short backgrounder.  In 1992 the cod stocks on our Grand Banks had been decimated by over-fishing.  Canada totally mismanaged the resource and was forced to shut it down.  At one time we could catch cod whenever we wanted to but during the "cod moratorium" we weren't allowed to catch even one for our own use.  While the resource is making a comeback its not enough for a large commercial fishery but thanks to the big hearted crowd in our nations capital we're permitted to catch 5 cod per person each day.

Cathy brought a jigger so we could try from our kayaks.

Cathy and I rafted up and threw the jigger overboard.  She spooled off I don't how many feet before it hit bottom.  She pulled it up sightly and began "sawing" away.  The jigger is pulled up and let sink repeatedly in the motion of a hand saw and with baited breath we waited for that tug on the line signaling we had one.

Repeated attempts yielded no reward so we pulled the jigger in having only sent it on a swim and headed for our campsite.

We were perched on a 15 meter hill overlooking Conception Bay.  We could have camped on the beach but we liked the view from up on high so we carried only what we needed (tent, sleeping bag, thermarest, etc) to populate what we called Ant City.  The rest of the stuff we left ...

... one the beach where happy hour ensued before ...

... supper.

After supper I gathered what wood was on the beach and we had a fire, not a large one but as large as we could make it with the limited amount of fire wood.  It cooled down considerably as the sun began to set behind the cliff above our heads where the tents were set up.  We decided not to open the bar until the fire had burned down and we had climbed safely up to our lofty perch.

The wind that was gentle at sea level accelerated up the cliff face and blew quite strongly where we had camped.  Cathy's tent had two doors so the three of us sat looking out the back door and out of the wind.  We played guessing games and laughed so hard my sides began to hurt.

Eventually the wind dropped, thankfully, and we moved to sit in the front door.  Four kilometers across the water the lights of Conception Bay South filled the horizon.  Cathy got a craving for Cheezies and I suggested pizza.  She texted Dean to see if he would bring it out to us.  We laughed some more and around 2:00 am we hit the hay.

A wonderful day full of adventure finished with a night of sound sleep.  Good night Irene!