Bonavista to Trinity

 

We are on plan, we even have a bit of slack time-wise, but we nevertheless have to pick the places we will visit, and Trinity was mentioned by most of yachties I talked to (I try to speak to any person with local knowledge; during our Mediterranean trip in 2015, I had nearly given up on Greece, and the morning  we were due to leave for a shorter version of the trip, the information from a yachtie I talked to on the dock flipped me to press on and cross to Greece, and it turned out this was the correct decision).

So, heading to Trinity; there is some weather coming, and it is supposed to be a good shelter; we might spend some days there.

 

Indeed, we arrive in a very nice place. There is a good quay, just in front of a restaurant – quite a change to fishing harbors.

We did not get many blows in harbors; generally we could find quays or moorings providing proper shelter according to the conditions. One can be selective, because there are not many boats to compete for the right spots!

 As we will realize in the next days, Trinity is a town geared towards tourism: no ice factory, no fish logistics, no piles of nets or cod traps.  No, Trinity is all neat and clean. You can see that there is some intent (from who ? town council ? a group of local citizens ? the church committee ? ) to shape the village this way. It has a bit of a MysticSeaport vibe - no derelict house in sight, on the contrary, they are very well maintained, in coordinated colors. A number of quite luxurious holiday cottages;  3 restaurants, including one that only serves a 3-dishes course, for $65. Alltogether, a very big change from all the other places we have seen in Newfoundland. I’d say, the” gling gling” of the cash register has here replaced the “beep beep beep beep “of the forklifts backing on the fishing quays we got accustomed to. 

We haven’t dined there. But Trinity seems to position for high end tourism. It seems most of the village are holiday cottages, BnBs, or vacation home owned by foreigners. Lots of foreign residents. 

I take a tour with a local guide, very instrcuctive.This town had a huge economic presence in the past centuries. It is quite clear that all the fishing (there was no other resource) was leaving nearly no added value to Newfoundlanders, as the trade was entirely controlled by merchants – in Trinity 2 or 3 families from Poole controlled the whole town for a couple of centuries (funny enough, today all the holiday rental cottages seem to belong to one company, and the restaurant, the quay, the souvenir shop to another guy).  Those merchants provided the ships, the crews - the crew situation is unclear, but they were mostly compensated in goods, not in money. For shore crew (to work the fish), the merchants were picking folks in Ireland for the season, and were supposed to bring them back home in the fall, but many were left to their own means and quite a few ended dying of exposure and hunger during winter (the tour guide read this interesting compilation of interments records). Some of the crew were also “escaping” to try to make a living on their own inland, or in the outports.  Altogether, the vibe is that the system was rather medieval, and I suspect that it was quire deliberately kept so –  until newfoundland became part of Canada, it is not clear to me what political body was caring for the inhabitants, and the merchants were probably very determinant in shaping the “regulations”.

Winter was definitely a hard season there, but with Eric we agree that summer was probably much more easy to live, probably close to what we experience, which is, pretty similar to a Breton summer. We understand that this summer might be exceptionally good , it might bias our judgment, but there are many hints that summer was a good season:  just consider for instance that  for drying cod on the beaches, you need dry weather …Locals were also keeping a few animals and gardens.  So, it was not survival, for the whole fishing season.

Trinity is a nice place, but after a while it feels a bit contrived. We are looking forward to move, but we wait out to let some weather blow by.