Just down the coast from Francois is Grey River. It is a far more intricate system of fjords than Francois. You can see that in the picture below. At the bottom of the picture is Gulch Cove which is associated with a story of a desperate voyage of one Howard Blackburn. He lost his hands rowing back to shore at Gulch Cove in January 1883. His title was "The Fingerless Navigator." The tale is told in Joseph E. Garland's novel Lone Voyager.
Jerts Cove is rumored to face the same fate as Francois. It has none of the charm of Francois, nor is it picture-worthy. But the townspeople are very friendly and welcoming, inviting us to come back and tie up at the town dock once the evening ferry left at 5:15 pm.
Since it was early afternoon, we took a leisurely motor up the several arms of Grey River. The entrance into Grey River is nowhere nearly as open and inviting as Francois. In fact, the casual visitor could miss the entrance entirely!
As we motored up the Southeast Arm, we came to the north side of Gulch Cove. The water depths increased dramatically to 28 and 37 meters. One can imagine the glacier taking advantage of fault lines and planes of weakness to carve out the rock and deepen the bottom of the Arm and Cove. Here's a picture of the north side of Gulch Cove, taken from SE Arm.
Where the fjord opens up at the confluence of SE Arm and the bay, the view is expansive.
And the massive hill in the center of the photo above is dramatic.
Especially when Charlie is framed by it.
On our way back from SE Arm, we saw a small, open outboard-powered runabout loaded with firewood. We saw this fellow go out of Jert a couple of hours earlier with an empty boat, so we concluded that this was a firewood-gathering effort.
We decided to push on to Ramea that night for water and Burgeo the next day for fuel rather than spend the night in Grey River. We had become conscious of Hurricane Earl moving up the coast. It was forecasted to become stationary off of St. John's and we wanted to get as far west as we could to minimize the effects of its wind field.
You'll see how successful we would be!
Cheers,
Brio
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