July 20 St. Andrews to Alma

Shortly after leaving the St. Andrews, we were treated to dozens of vintage cars and trucks with vintage trailers in tow headed the other way. They were a group who were traveling from Labrador to British Columbia. There were so many that we simply pulled off to the side to watch them go by. Pictures of these vintage rigs? Yep, should have taken some. I plead an extended "Senior Moment".



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Our destination this day was Fundy National Park. Once we set up camp, we set off to explore. First, we headed into the small town of Alma, just outside the campground. The tide was out and that left the fleet of lobster boats sitting on the bottom of the bay. That was a sight that we just don't get to see in the marinas of the Duluth/Superior harbor!

Photos for this day are here.

Back in the park, we stopped to take the trail to Dickson Falls. The many staircases on the trail lead you to a pretty series of waterfalls reminiscent of waterfalls on the North Shore of Lake Superior. The rocks and trees along the trail were covered in lush blankets of mosses and lichens.

Pointe Wolf, at the end of the road, presented us with another long series of staircases. These stairs lead down to the beach at the head of a small cove. Nancy decided to let Fred take the stairs and bring back a picture or two.

The tide was coming in by the time we returned to Alma. That allowed the boats that had been out on the bay working to come back to the dock to unload their catch. We spent an educational few hours talking with the lobstermen and eating fried clams from the restaurant next to the dock.

Once the boats off-loaded the catch, the men began to load new bait for their traps. The bait they use is mackerel. Some of the mackerel came frozen into large cubes of fish. Some came frozen as individual frozen fish. It turned out that the individual frozen fish were food-grade mackerel that can't find a market in the restaurants and stores.

We noticed a glaring absence of gulls around the docks. That seemed odd, since there was a lot of food around. The gulls in Duluth would be swarming to fight over the pieces of fish that end up on the dock and in the water. We asked the lobstermen how they managed to keep the gulls away. Did they have a particularly effective "gull abatement/eradication" program? "Nope", they said, "The gulls get so much to eat from the tide flats at low tide that they can hardly fly. They're too full to bother coming to the docks."