Over the past couple of days, we did have to backtrack back to St. John's in order to make the trek out to Gull Island for our permit for the Puffins. We made the drive down to Witless Bay early on Monday morning and actually ended up taking a great scouting boat ride out to the island to see if the sees were calm enough for us to land on the rocky shore. Thank goodness!! It was so back to shore, pick up the truck from the next town, load about 50 pounds of photo gear into a small zodiak boat and we were off for the island again. It was a tricky landing with lots of slippery rocks and moving boat, but we managed to get our gear onto the shore and proceed to get it up the steep rocky slope. Matt had carried all our gear up about 30 feet to the place where we would photograph and we were back down on the rocks and watched in horror as my camera bag proceeded to tumble down the rocky slope and end up down by us again. A quick check of my camera and lenses in the bag show only a couple of broken lens hoods so far!! It could have been disasterous!!!!
We photographed for about 4 hours in a very limited area with pretty bad light, but it was an amazing experience with over 60,000 nesting pairs of Puffins all around us. We watched as the Puffins landed in the cold Atlantic waters to fish for their young in the burrow nests. Almost every single Puffin was flying by with either Capelin (a small fish) or a small squid in its mouth to feed its young - So Amazing!!!
We are now on the western coast of Newfoundland in Gros Morne National Park. It was a very rainy yucky 9 hour drive from St. John's this morning. We also have a front jack on the trailer that has stopped working so we are stuck with leaving the trailer on the truck until we can figure out how to fix it (or rather, Matt can figure out how to fix it).
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