Easy passage

What once was a tricky harbour to enter for fishers in the community of Newtown is now an easy-to-navigate one, following work completed under the Infrastructure Stimulus Fund.

Work is near-finished to dredge a portion of the harbour, which at times was too shallow to allow boats to enter their homeport.

Brent Gill, board chair for the Newtown Harbour Authority, said his boat has been damaged in the past from striking the shoal, or sandbar within the harbour.

"The channel we came through, the water would maybe be five feet, and most of the boats need five feet of water to float in," he said.

Mr. Gill can recall times where he was forced to wait three hours in order to safely steer his boat into the harbour.

The million-dollar effort to eliminate the shoal should keep boat owners like Mr. Gill from dipping into their own pockets to make repairs.

Work began in October, and was scheduled to be completed by April 1. Mr. Gill, speaking with The Beacon last Thursday, said there remained one rock in the channel that still needed to be blasted.

"They'll deal with that, and then we'll be done," he said, adding that approximately 1,600 truckloads of sand has been removed as part of the dredging process.

The last time the harbour had been dredged was in 1981, making the most recent work long overdue, he said.

"We have a bigger fleet of boats here now," he said, with several calling the harbour home compared to two in years past. Six of the boats are 34-foot, 11 inch ships, with two 25-foot boats and some smaller ones.

"Everybody has a couple of licences aboard their boat. The six (larger) boats take up a dozen crews, or maybe 10."

An island across the channel from the wharf was blasted to help increase the width of the harbour to 80 feet.

During the blasting period, boats from the harbour were left on the dry dock in Musgrave Harbour, and have since returned. Three boats were fishing as of Thursday, with crab processors represented by the Association of Seafood Producers having agreed to begin processing at the price-setting panel's rate of $1.35 per pound.

Mr. Gill had been unable to begin fishing as of Thursday due to rough sea conditions, which created impressive waves along the Kittiwake Coast.

"I'm dying to get out there, and wondering what's going on," he said. "You're hearing around town that boats out there are not seeing much crab. Some have done alright, and others haven't done that good. Just itching and craving to get out there and see it for myself."

With prices remaining on par with last year's season combined with a low demand for capelin and uncertainty surrounding cod and lobster, Mr. Gill said it is hard to be optimistic about the outlook for the fishery in 2010.

He is however pleased to see the work on the harbour almost finished, and said there is more work that could be done on it with help from government.

"There seems to be lots of government money out there for wharfs and harbours. We had a section of our wharf done in 2005 - we had a new deck and all new wharf cribs done - so I would say this year, we'll probably look to get a new inside section."

From speaking with people who have worked on the dredging this year, Mr. Gill said he has been told it is in rough shape. He said the inside section was last worked on over 30 years ago.

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