Newfoundland, part of the easternmost province of Canada, is a place of wild nature where one can dive on WWII wrecks, in historic iron-ore mines, birdwatch, snorkel with humpback whales and kayak with minke whales. Brandi Mueller shares her adventure there.

Last summer, my path led me for the first time to Newfoundland, Canada, more precisely to the town of Conception Bay South. Cave explorer Jill Heinerth invited me along with Rick Stanley, the owner of Ocean Quest Adventure Resort, to dive some wrecks in the bay. On this occasion, Stanley told us about a project whose realization he has been working toward for several years.

It’s an unsettled kind of morning on Chedabucto Bay of Canada’s east coast. The sun is shining—it’s really quite pleasant—but there’s a brisk wind blowing from the southwest. What that translates into here in the waters between Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia is heavy seas. We’re pounding through four to six foot swells in a 25-foot rigid hull inflatable boat. The ride out to the dive site is turning out to be a wild, you might say bone-jarring, experience. All this for a dive that I’m still not certain I want to do at all.

Just knowing that Vikings started a settlement here a thousand years ago and that the first fishermen from Europe began arriving in the 1500’s adds to a sense of history that cloaks the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. It’s a sense that I’m acutely aware of on this sunny day in June on board the vessel, Ocean Quest, as the skipper, Bill Flaherty, navigates across Conception Bay towards Bell Island.

Many millions of years ago, a piece of a land broke away from the ancient continent, Gondwanaland, from the place we now know as Morocco, and traveled a long journey westward until it collided with the North American continent a bit to the south of Greenland. The first Europeans who visited this new world in 986 A.D. were the Icelandic Vikings under the command of Thorfinn Karlsefni, but the newcomers did not settle the area for a long time.

Five hundred years later, on June, 24, 1497, eighteen British sailors on the crew ship Matthew under the command of Genoese Captain Giovanni Caboto (in English, John Cabot) made the long crossing over the Atlantic Ocean in search of a sea route to China, but landed instead on the coast of an unknown island. They raised the Union Jack—the British flag—on this island and named it New Found Land.