Where the story begins

Once upon a time there was a little beach in Healey's Cove.  The cove is an out-of-the way spot just outside the North Arm of Holyrood, in Conception Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador.

We have owned a house in Healey's Cove since 1984.  At first it was our summer place, but since 1998 it has been our year-round home.  That's 29 years as property owners and 15 years as permanent residents, but it is significant to note that we were not born here and our surname is not Healey.

The little beach is small, but how much space do you need to get close to the water, dip your fingers in the ocean, toss in a few stones or just sit and admire the view?  It is the only beach access along the north shore of Holyrood harbour, a distance of about 5 km.

If I had known the beach was in jeopardy I would have taken more pictures of it.  Here's a shot snapped on a wet day, taken, like most of my beach pictures, from the upstairs of our house, looking south towards North Arm.  See those big boulders?  They were always my way of measuring whether the tide was high or low.  We used to harvest mussels from the beach in the area on the right of the shot, but that was before the town installed a sewer outfall back beyond the left (north) edge of the scene.  This was in about 2000.

We were not unhappy about the sewer outfall.  Giving up the free mussels was a reasonable trade for hooking into the town sanitary system and getting off the septic tank.  The construction of the sewer did rip up the laneway in front of the house and make a huge mess of the bank between us and the ocean.  But -- it did not destroy the beach.  The sewer pipe is covered in with an armour stone breakwater to the north of the beach (beyond left of picture) and the beach remained intact.

The town and construction company had no provision for remediating the bank, which stood naked, with nothing but grey gravel.  So . . . we bought bags of clover seed to scatter down the hill, planted a few small spruce trees, threw in handfuls of lupin seeds and did what we could to encourage growth of anything that would stabilize the bank.  We placed an old picnic table at the edge for public use, and to discourage drivers from getting too close to the edge.  

Not a bad view, is it?  A public lane, the unpaved extension of Healey's Cove Road, runs between our house and the table.  The bank drops straight to the ocean behind the table and the beach is to the right, south of here.  It is now covered in with a mass of clover, wild flowers, spruce saplings and escaped raspberry bushes.  Not tidy, but mostly green.