NEWFOUNDLAND – THE SPERM WHALE & THE LAKE MONSTER.
Day 105 – The high today was 67 degrees and it was mostly cloudy until later in the afternoon when it poured down rain. When we got up it was 60 degrees, cloudy & humid. We stuck around the RV until after lunch, then drove into Triton. We stopped at the Post Office to mail something, then looked for a place where Rob could get a haircut. The place was closed.
We drove to the end of the road, a village called Brighton. A nice little town on beautiful bays, they had walking trails & parks with colorful benches; everything was spotless. On the way back out of Triton, we stopped at an old copper mining site. In the most recent places we’ve visited, mining was really big in its heyday. Here, you could see the copper-colored, mineral-rich rocks, and the water near the old mine was also copper colored. Mussel farming is big here and the bays are full of the colorful buoys. When the Capelin are rolling, the bay is filled with activity from the seabirds and the whales feed there. We looked for whales & didn’t see any but were told there were several Minke Whales out there yesterday.
Click on any picture below to see a slideshow.
We stopped at the Triton Sperm Whale Pavilion. This was a wonderful exhibit & our tour guide was fantastic. A retired teacher, Terry spent a couple of hours taking us around and going over the Whale’s anatomy. (They had a Sperm Whale Skeleton; the building was built around it.) I wish this man had been my teacher in school – I might’ve learned something! Have you ever heard of Ambergris? It is very rare & very expensive. When some (not all) Sperm Whales eat Squid, the beak is not digestible. Those few Sperm Whales develop a waxy waste product around the beak & regurgitate it to rid themselves of the mass. With time, after exposure to the Ocean & air, this waxy substance amazingly becomes a highly-sought-after additive for high-end perfumes – this is where Ambergris comes from. Sperm Whales use echo-location like Dolphins, and it is suspected that they can even stun or kill their Squid prey with sound. They are the largest of the toothed Whales; in fact, they are the largest toothed predator. They do not have baleen. They can be found world-wide; they migrate seasonally. They have the largest brain on Earth. The Sperm Whale’s blow hole is highly skewed to the left front of the head. This gives rise to a distinctive bushy forward-angle spray. They live more than 60 years and can weigh 41 tons. They average 52 to 67 feet in length and dive to 7382 feet.
I’m starting to see the problem… Sperm Whale Pavillion, Triton, NF
And last, but not least, there’s the legend of the Loch Ness Serpent in Lake Monster Country, Robert’s Arm. Cressie, Crescent Lake’s very own Serpent resides there. From the website https://www.cryptopia.us/site/2010/02/cressie-newfoundland/:
“These large, eel-like creatures are notorious for attacking divers during search and rescue operations… and have even been credited with assailing their victims through thick sheets of winter ice.
Central Newfoundland’s Crescent Lake harbors a quaint fishing town – known as Robert’s Arm – along its shore, and a big secret in its depths. Known to the locals as “Cressie”, this animal has been reported as being eel-like in appearance and averaging between 5 and 15-feet in length.
The first reports of this mysterious lake dweller can be traced back to pre-colonial Native American legends, which warned of the Woodum Haoot (Pond Devil) or Haoot Tuwedyee (Swimming Demon), both of which purportedly dwelled in the lake. Since the early 1900’s there have been numerous reports of encounters with this creature (or creatures) and not all of them have been pleasant.One of the more recent accounts concerns the underwater search for the corpse of a downed pilot, who had crashed his plane into the depths of Crescent Lake in the mid-1980’s. The scuba divers, who braved the black depths of the lake in the hopes of finding the pilot’s corpse, found themselves surrounded by a vicious school of gigantic eels (described as being as thick as a man’s thigh) who proceeded to attack the them with voracious intensity. The divers retreated to the surface posthaste, neither of the divers were severely wounded, but both were visibly shaken by the event.
Another bizarre phenomenon which has been associated with creatures in Crescent Lake, involves mysterious holes which have been known to appear in the ice sheet which covers the water during the brutal, Newfoundland winters. Often mistaken (due to their size) as the results of tragic snowmobile accidents, divers who have mounted exploratory expeditions beneath the ice in order to ascertain the cause of the holes, rarely find any man-made objects to account for the ice rifts. This has, of course, led some to speculate that these tremendous breaks in the ice are not caused by something falling in, but, rather, by something bursting out.On the afternoon of July 9, 1991, at approximately 12:00 PM a gigantic, eel-like entity was seen on the lake by retired school teacher and local newspaper correspondent, Fred Parsons. Parsons claimed to have seen a shadowy, 20-foot long, serpentine creature undulating across the surface of the lake.
Just two months later on September 5th, 1991, at about 4:30pm, Robert’s Arm native Pierce Rideout, was driving his pickup truck when he noticed a commotion on the surface of Crescent Lake. He watched a black, slow moving object (approximately 15-feet in length) drop below the surface and rise again: some 500-feet beyond the shore.
Ironically, Rideout admitted that just a few days before his sighting he had openly ridiculed the idea of a “monster” in Crescent Lake, but that his attitude had changed since his not-so close encounter. In July of 2000, Richard Goudie and Robbie Watkins were two of a group of people who saw Cressie while landscaping on the Hazelnut Hiking and Adventure Trail and as recently as August 14, 2003, the CBC published a report about a woman named Vivian Short who claimed to have seen a serpentine animal with a fish like head, which she believed could easily have been capable of devouring 4 or 5 swimmers.
On September 17, 2008 History Channel’s Monster Quest broadcast an episode entitled “Lake Monsters of the North,” which focused on the legends of the monster eels……….Whatever it is that lurks beneath the waves in Crescent Lake — be it giant carnivorous eels or creatures as yet unknown — there can be no doubt that it is large, it is vicious, and it remains one of the most credible North American lake cryptids.”
Cressie the Crescent Lake Monster, Robert’s Arm, NF
We returned to the RV, sat out in the tent for awhile until the rain brought us inside. We had a great dinner of Baked Halibut in Roasted Garlic Aioli with Broccoli Florets, served over Brown Rice. Off to bed, we dreamed of fish. I wonder why.
So is ambergris obtained when inside a “harvested” sperm whale or is it floating in the sea after regurgitation?
Hi Diane!
I am pleased to say that due to Terry, teacher extraordinaire, I can answer your question. And a valid one it is.
Normally, ambergris can be found on a beach where it has washed up, or fishermen have even picked it up floating in the Ocean. But Terry also told us about it being found in the stomach of a beached whale.
The question Rob & I have wondered since is, how do you know it is ambergris? There’s so much stuff you can find on a beach. Does it look like seaweed? Does it look like waxy vomit, whatever that looks like?
Hope you and Ted are enjoying Havenhurst!
Vicki and Rob