A letter from a loyal reader
Dear Cindy, May I say at the beginning that I really enjoy your Weather Page which I get in the St. John’s Evening Telegram. I am impressed by your breadth of meteorological knowledge but particularly enjoy your links to the more folkloric less scientific aspects of weather predictions.
I was intrigued awhile back to see your reference to Wreckhouse located just outside Port Aux Basques, Newfoundland. Wreckhouse is located just below a section of the Long Range Mountains and refers to a section of the TCH where extremely high winds are common. In an earlier day it also contained a section of the Railway Line where train cars frequently were blown from the tracks. Eventually a local farmer Laughie McDougal was paid a small retainer and equipped with a landline telephone to report daily wind condi- tions. He was often referred to as the Human Wind Gauge. I have heard that on occasion some enterprising Station Agent ignored his warnings which to their chagrin resulted in cars leaving the tracks.
I lived in Port aux Basques in the ’60s and visited Laughie’s Farm from time to time. Fortuitously he built his house only one story to reduce the possibility of it being ravaged by the high wind cascading down from the mountains.
Laughie’s Farm was located to the right as one passed through two small twin hills which led you into the Codroy River Valley where the weather (except for the high wind) was generally sunny. Several of the Port aux Basques residents had cottages in the valley to escape periodically the dismal fog. Port aux Basques itself experienced many foggy days. Radar saved the day and I recall many mornings looking out my kitchen window and observing a CN Ferry moving silently and slowly into the harbor appearing almost ghostlike through the fog.
When my family was in the process of moving to Port aux Basques from the Gros Morne area we were told by a retired policeman, who had served there in earlier days, that when we got there we could boil a threeminute egg by using the Fog Alarm as a timer. And he added gleefully: “You will be able to do that every morning of the year!” It turned out to be just as prophetic as another chap who told us that the wind was so high in Bonne Bay (Gros Morne) that it blew the cows off their feet!
Doug Spracklin St. John’s
Cindy Day is SaltWire Network’s Chief Meteorologist.