Discover Newfoundland's "Iceberg Alley"
by Ian Stalker
14 April, 2008 - Canadian Travel Press
21 April, 2008 - www.travelbestbuys.com
Paul Alcock knows exactly what tune will catch the attention of his clients as they approach one of the many colossal, seasonal gifts from Greenland to Newfoundland’s tourist trade.
Alcock, president of St. Anthony-based Northland Discovery Boat Tours, plays the theme from the movie Titanic when his boat nears an iceberg, a recording that passengers quickly react to.
“You wouldn’t believe the expressions on people’s faces when we play it,” he says, adding some laugh while others become emotional, with the Titanic tragedy forever creating a link in people’s minds between icebergs and the sinking of a reputedly unsinkable ship that went down 584 kms off the Newfoundland coast.
Viewing very big icebergs has become very big business in Newfoundland. Alcock’s company, which also gives its thousands of summer clients, sightings of whales and dolphins, is one of what he estimates is around a dozen “very serious” Newfoundland companies offering tours that seek out icebergs, seabirds and marine mammals.
Tours aren’t the only manner in which icebergs generate income for Newfoundland, with enterprising Newfoundlanders now selling bottled water made available from pieces of thawed icebergs and even vodka made in part with water that came from smaller chunks of ice labeled bergy bits.
Paul Emmons, whose Halifax, Nova Scotia-based company Ambassatours has summer tours of Newfoundland, will ask boat captains to retrieve bits of icebergs that can be used for ice cubes, with Emmons labelling the practice of snaring ice floating on the ocean “ice fishing.”
Sightings of the likes of humpback whales generate excitement among tourists, but Alcock says it’s probably the icebergs that are biggest draw for his firm and Newfoundland is an ideal part of the world to see them. Some 600 to 800 – the great majority having broken free from Greenland glaciers – drift past its eastern coast in the summer, with June and early July being peak season, while good sighting usually continues into the third week of July, he reports.
Indeed, the waters off Newfoundland are dubbed Iceberg Alley and there’s even a web site – www.icebergfinder.com – reporting the location of bergs, which vary dramatically in size, with the largest recorded anywhere covering more territory than Belgium.
Requests from some curious customers to actually have tour boats pull up alongside the floating ice so passengers can set foot on it are rejected for safety reasons, with the unpredictable nature of icebergs meaning they may suddenly overturn, while huge chunks of above-water ice can also break free and plummet down.
Lorraine McGrath of Destination St. John’s, the tourism promotion board for Newfoundland’s capital of St. John’s, labeled the 2007 summer “phenomenal” because of the number of icebergs tourists could view.
“I’ve lived her all my life and I can only imagine how spectacular they are for someone seeing them for a first time.”
She adds memories of the Titanic continue to surface among iceberg-viewers long after that vessel sank below the surface and McGrath makes a point of answering even seemingly silly questions from visitors in a good-humoured manner.
“You’d never believe how many tourists have asked me: ‘Is that the iceberg that sank the Titanic?’” she reports. “I answer: ‘No, dear. That’s a different one.’”