Sea ice

And about a kilometer away, still Sunday afternoon, on the beach by Fox Harbour, a few clumpers were up on the beach and a few growlers in the water, but otherwise little -- the area was in the shadow of the ENE wind. Halfway across SW Arm, there was lots of pack ice, though. Again, 2001-expired Fuji 200 film, shot at about 100 in the Sea and sea Motormarine 35 camera. Turnt in PSP to make up for my poor levelling.

I got my film developed today, the film I took the past weekend. With a light east-northeasterly wind, on Saturday the little arm started to fill up with the pack ice lurking outside in the bigger bay. By Sunday at mid-day this is what the arm looked like, looking over our yard to Ganny Cove. This is 2001-expired Fuji 200 film, shot at about 100 in my Sea and Sea Motormarine 35 camera. The flare is a result of shooting through a window.

The first of May is a lot of things. For some people who live just north of St John's, a half-hour drive from downtown St John's, it's when the May Bushes go up, usually with a splash of blue somewhere. Here, with such a blue sky, the little blue ribbons look almost black. This is in Middle Cove, and there happened to be a small iceberg in the bight when I stopped to get the picture.

Celebrating the birthday of one of my sisters, we were at a waterfront pub last night. This was the view of the harbour from the pub's window. The harbour is nearly full of northern pack ice blown into the harbour by northeasternly winds. People have been doing so but I would not dare walk on this. It's too loose. But in about 1974 the NE wind lasted longer; the harbour completely filled up with ice. It jammed in, and rafted up on edges and it was possible then to walk across the harbour.

I can't remember which oil rig has thrown in its towel after months of low oil prices, but this is it. And it happened to be outside Bay Bulls when a little bergy bit, a mere clumper or perhaps better, a growler, was sitting near the wash on the south side. There are many much bigger icebergs around here right now. You can just barely see the bergy bit on the right, behind the bushes. We were driving by and I was lucky enough to be in the passenger seat.

A friend in central Canada asked me to get him a picture of the icebergs that are passing by right now, on their way from thousands of years in glacial repose to a very short and certain meltdown in our waters. The best iceberg pictures have lots of light but today is a dark and grey day, so I am left with a dark and dreary picture of this one. I was about a half kilometer from it, on the shore. I estimate its length at about 50 metres.

The view across St John's Bay this morning as an iceberg slowly made its way to the South.

I went to Fort Amherst, at the mouth of the harbour of St John's, this afternoon to look at the long spit of northern ice coming south. It was a good five km offshore where I was, but it was right into shore at Cape Spear. That is what this picture shows, Cape Spear, about six km from where I was, with the ice pushing up against the landwash. Many bays are filled now with these broken pans of ice, each up to a couple of metres thick, but with almost no icebergs among them yet. Today, I saw a few bergy bits, pieces sticking up perhaps four metres or so, but they might have been just pans turned on their edges by the pressure of the ice behind them. Probably not proper bergy bits. Every day we are hearing reports of two very dangerous things. One is the scattered polar bear coming ashore from these passing pans, and looking for a meal. The other is crowds of people foolishly jumping up on the bobbing ice coming ashore, while the sea heaves underneath them. I saw neither this afternoon.

I think the best placename in the whole of St John's is Wash Ballocks, right at the bottom of Signal Hill. Some old charts, maybe as an attempt to avoid the suggestion that you'll get your bollocks washed here if you're not careful, wrote the name as "Wash-Ball Rocks." That's not much different, really, but it at least offered the polite suggestion that, say, cannonballs were in the water. Yeah yeah. This was yesterday afternoon, before the wind pushed the pack ice into the harbour.