Guess i should chime in with my 1.85 cents' worth on this topic, since i
don't see too many cold-water entries so far.  My most "remote"
shelling trip was to the small Labrador town of Nain (as in the Bible),
which is as far north as one can go on the Western Atlantic seaboard by
ferry or planes with actual wheels and not floats to land with.  I had
made contact with a scallop trawler captain who, like most captains
around these parts, gladly agreed to take me out on his modest little
vessal.  I could pretty well write a book on my various adventures
there, since i had to stay until the next plane came no matter what, but
suffice it to say it was NOT your average day on the beach in sunny
southern climes.  //  We got off to a promising start, finding a couple
of good little patches of the largest Chlamys islandica Muller that
anyone in the "shell world" has ever seen (the WR still stands from this
trip, although everyone there told me they have seen far larger
ones..... "big as a dinner plate"!), and good numbers of an as yet
undescribed Cyclocardia which has been overlooked by many other
researchers even though they MUST have seen them   (but that's another
story.....), plus a few of those delightful northern Trophoninae.  In a
fairly short day of fishing, i managed to save enough Icelandic Scallops
to last me for years afterwards (all gone now, sadly!), which were later
cleaned up nicely by a delightful Inuit man and his wife, whom i found
by asking who the harders worker around was: the natives at the local
gathering-place simply pointed towards a large table seemingly moving
down the street all by itself, balanced upon the back of a 5 foot
nothing wire-thin man who gladly spent several hours with his hands in
the icy waters fresh out of the harbour, in return for what we both
agreed was a fair wage.  Unfortunately, that was the only fishing we
managed, since they simply didn't find enough to make the effort worth
their while and decided instead to try to attract some of the mineral
explorers who were crawling all over town, seeking another Voisey's Bay
Nickel/silver/cobalt deposit, for a charter trip.  This of course meant
that i had to find other accomodations!!  Since the only inn in town was
a) full, and b) too expensive for my tastes,  i ended up spending a
couple of nippy nights in a sub-freezing fish shed until a very kind
doctor from the town's Grenfell Mission clinic took me in for the
remainder of my sojourn there (met him at the local Moravian church  -
fascinating service:  all the hymns were in High German, while the
sermon was in Inuktitut, the Canadian and Greenland Inuit language,
which is perhaps the healthiest of all the native languages in North
America, being the first tongue of nearly all the Inuit in the region,
and the official language of the nearly completely Inuit territory in
the Canadian North - Igaluit.  The former i did fairly well with.  The
latter, not.  // ANYWAY,  i spent the next 10 days roaming the foothills
of the Iron Mountains, picking berries, meeting natives of all ages, and
climbing cliffs at 2 a.m. (DEFINITELY another story.....). I even left a
little "cache" of Philippine shells in the interior of an elaborate
"Inukshuk" (pile of stones shaped like a human, originally used as
landmarks and "Killroy was here" symbols, but in these days of GPS and
such, mostly built just for fun), which i hope will be discovered sooner
or later by the local children, many of whom apparently had never seen
anything like them before - the local Hudson's Bay store (which sold
everything from hard tack to hunting supplies) didn't yet sell such
"treasures" as minature lobster traps with Canadian flags on the front
and Phlippine shells inside them yet.  All in all, despite the lack of
actual shells beyond the first day,  it was an adventure i'd partake of
again in a heartbeat - and DEFINITELY a "remote place"!

 From the Great White North,
Ross Mayew.

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