Have you ever seen a bloated whale carcass resting on the shore and thought, “I want that?”
David Boyd has.
And after years of work, the Newfoundlander has single-handedly created a full-sized skeleton display worthy of a museum.
Boyd said his project began in 2006 when he heard that a marine mammal had washed up in Fortune Harbour, Nfld.
“And I said to myself, well, you know, I’d like to have a whale,” Boyd, the owner of the Prime Berth Fishing Heritage Centre in Twillingate, said. “So I called up the government officials in St. John’s and asked them what they were going to do with the whale.”
Officials told Boyd they were looking for someone to tow the carcass away. So he did – to a deserted island, where he would let birds scavenge the whale’s decomposed body for the next three years.
After it was picked clean, Boyd was left with the bare bones of the beast, which he then assembled into the impressive display now seen sitting on his dock.
Boyd said he had a bit of an upstream swim on his journey. He was in touch with experts who apparently weren’t thrilled with his quest to create the display without hiring experts.
“They said you can try that, but it won’t be museum quality.
“I said, well, thank you for the encouragement,” Boyd said.
But three years later, after the pieces were all put in place, Boyd was able to show off a picture to those who might have doubted him.
“I said, ‘I know it’s probably not museum quality like you said, but it didn’t cost the government and the taxpayers half a million dollars, either.’”
The whale skeleton is just one of the many pieces of Maritime paraphernalia Boyd has in his heritage centre.
For him, it’s a matter of keeping history alive.
“You know I’ve got salt in my veins,” he said. “I saw all the artifacts of the fishery disappearing, and I said, somebody should do something about it.”
