Sunday, August 4, 2024

Fogo Island: Tilting, The Great Auk, The Corner of the Earth, and a Broken Ferry

 Aug 4, 2024

   Started the day with pancakes and chatted with a woman who grew up coming to her grandparents home in Tilting and is now bringing her kids to the ancestral home each summer.

There are a few family names in small towns and they are repeated every where. This historic fishing stage, where cod was unloaded from boats, prepped and dried on flakes, 
belonged to the family of our new author friend.

The historic Dwyer residence - don’t think this way of supporting the structure would pass code down home

Ron is good at self promotion - this was in front of his house




Crackerberries

Sweet community spot in Clay Cove
Continued on to Joe Batt’s Arm (again - I love the names).
The enourmous white odd looking building across the harbor is a high-end hotel built by a Fogo Island woman who made it big in IT in the 90’s.  Her intent was to help her home reimagine itself after it was decimated by the collapse of cod fishing. Fogo Island now has a thriving art industry.


Intro to the book that is placed along the trail. And we read every page




We have come across three buildings on Fogo that seem so out of place - the Fogo Island Inn seen above, a black building shaped like a magazine organizer that is an artist residency site, and this building, also for incubating artists in residency.


A Gaze, known as a hunting blind down south
Almost lost my phone down this crack while admiring rocks
Various flora existing in a tough environment
More damn stairs


Statue of the Great Auk, hunted to extinction by 1852. The Auk faces Iceland, where there is another statue that points to the Icelandic island of Edley, last know breeding grounds of the Great Auk 

Someone put a rock “egg” next to it


Driftwood
This is a rock surface
This is a piece of driftwood - hard to tell the two apart from any distance
The cabin for the archeologists who work on digs here, uncovering info on the original indigenous inhabitants
Continued our exploration of the island



Brimstone Head, our next destination

The view from above
See all those damn stairs!


Looking out over the end of the earth according to the Flat Earth Society




The rocks here were jagged and different than anywhere else we had been so far
Going down was so much easier than going up these 225 steps
Got in line at 3:45 to catch the 4:30  ferry back to the main island. The departure time came and went with no line movement and we learned that the large ferry broke down and they were shuttling passengers and vehicles with the small ferry that had a capacity of 33 cars, or less if there were semis to board, and was slower than th large ferry. There are no services or food establishments at this end of the island. Luckily for those in cars, there were toilets down by the ferry, but the vending machine was out of service and there were no beverages to be had anywhere nearby.

A local woman stopped by to chat about our travels. Her brother was behind us and was trying to get to the mainland so he could go out with his fishing vessel. It was due to leave tomorrow afternoon and be out for 5 weeks catching 14 tons of shrimp this time. Geraldine had driven out from her home to bring some food to her brother Derrick. There is a mandatory rest period for the crew of the ferry and that last run left at 10pm, so we settled in for the night. We are so fortunate to have the van with all its amenities. We can eat, drink, and sleep comfortably while in line. Others are not so lucky. Some left, hoping to find lodging for the night, some made a water and food run and got back in line, sleeping as best they could. No one was happy.

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