![]() ![]() ![]() Johns, looks and feels a bit like an Irish San Francisco, with painted houses climbing uphill away from the bay. In the sunshine, it looks like a distillation of Scotland, Ireland and Norway, while its main town, St. Newfoundland is still fundamentally a fishing community, its shoreline a picturesque jigsaw of creeks, inlets and secret harbors, with fishing villages of pastel-colored clapperboard fishermen’s houses scattered about. Rogers stays well clear a melting berg is very unstable, he says, and a sudden change in weight distribution can cause it to cartwheel, which is lethal for a small boat if you’re too close.Īnd Iceberg Alley is very much ‘small boat’ territory. And when the sun hits it again, it ‘calves’ with a noise like thunder, releasing growlers the size of grand pianos into the water. The fog clears, revealing an archway through its middle which looks like a gateway to an icy, parallel world. On a good day, as many as 300 bergs can be found whispering along the shore at any one time, some as ancient as 10,000 years old. A huge beast, or at least it seems huge from this close, and one that would easily sink a ship. Suddenly, out of the fog, looms an enormous white shape, round-cornered, blue-veined and “like a dementor!” gasps a Harry Potter fan on board. What usually happens is that they are tranquilized by local rangers, and then airlifted back north. Rodgers reduces speed-he knows there’s something near-and mentions that the floating ice sometimes carries passengers namely, polar bears that realize too late that they’ve chosen a drifter when the ice starts to diminish around them and air starts to warm. “When they’ve got a completely flat surface, it’s sometimes hard to pick them up on the radar,” says captain Barry Rodgers as we steam out from Newfoundland’s St John’s Harbor on his day-trip boat, Iceberg Quest-and are instantly swallowed whole by the cotton wool of a fog bank, a regular hazard here in spring. Technology may have moved on since the days of the Titanic, but bergs are still scary beasts-especially when you can’t see them. Captain Barry Rogers skillfully maneuvers Iceberg Quest through the ice-filled waters of Newfoundland. ![]()
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