I found Cabot's Landing at the third attempt. His bust is staring out across the sea back to Bristol. All along the Cabot Trail, the shoreline is rocky and wooded: pink boulders and cobblestones interspersed with settlements of brightly coloured, wooden houses. At South Harbour I kayaked across the inlet to the sandbar and the deserted ocean beach on the other side. The view from there was of the New World, of the Norse, of Cabot.
Pleasant Bay was settled by Irish and everyone here still speaks as if they arrived from the Emerald Isle about three months ago. Jeff is the local jack-of-all-trades - computer technician to the local community, hostel owner, tourist guide. He pronounces "th" as "d" and says "loife" for "life". The other three towns in the area have totally different accents.
"Bay St. Laurence, now there's a rough town, as rough as it gets! They're all pretty in-bred up there."
Like everyone else along this coast, he has been involved with fishing all his "loife". When he was 19 he was caught in an open fibreglass boat with his brother as a storm hit.
"The winds were so weird - one wave we just had to go up and up and up and over the crest at the top. Then we just headed straight for the shore, forget the harbour! Then there was the fishing boat lost a few years ago in a freak storm, or that time a captain drove his boat back into harbour and straight into the wooden wharf at full throttle! The cabin and bridge were gone, all the windows blown out - they had to prise his fingers off the wheel!"
In winter, the water across to Québec is totally covered by pack ice. According to Jeff, five men have tried to cross the ice in winter but all were lost. Two were trawled up later by fishing boats.
