Newfoundland Circumnavigation

St. John’s: Your Newfoundland Circumnavigation Begins

St. John’s is often called North America’s oldest city, and it wears the title lightly. Colourful row houses tumble down steep hills. Laneways appear where you least expect them. Everything gathers around a harbour that couldn’t belong anywhere else. Below Signal Hill, the Narrows open like a doorway between the sheltered waterfront and the open Atlantic, giving the city one of the most striking settings on the continent.

Centuries of history live here, but nothing about it feels like a museum. A new generation of cooks is doing fresh, clever things with Newfoundland ingredients and old family recipes. Water Street is made for wandering, with independent shops, galleries, cafés and plenty of local character. Then evening comes, and music drifts out of the pubs and into the street, the same way it has for generations.

Historic, creative, colourful and wholly itself, St. John’s is where Newfoundland begins. For women travelling solo or with friends, it’s the kind of place that asks you to slow down, and then gives you every reason to stay.

Included Meals

Dinner onboard

Accommodations

Your cabin on the Ocean Nova

Miquelon: A Little Piece of France in the North Atlantic

Miquelon is a small French village with a character shaped as much by Europe as by the North Atlantic. Acadian, Basque, Breton and Norman roots run deep here. Generations of fishing and farming have shaped traditions built for island life. French is the language of everyday conversation, and local shops, cafés and artisans give the village a quiet, contemporary spirit.

Step beyond the houses and the landscape opens up fast: rocky headlands, still ponds, rolling dunes and low vegetation bent by the wind. Miquelon is joined to Langlade by La Dune, a twelve-kilometre ribbon of sand built by meeting ocean currents. Its shores have claimed many ships over the centuries. Trails lead out to wide Atlantic views, with coastal wildflowers and seabirds for company along the way.

Take the day at your own pace. Browse for something locally made, linger over a coffee, or follow the coastline wherever it pulls you. With French flavours, deep maritime roots and wild country right on the doorstep, Miquelon feels unlike anywhere else in North America.

Included Meals

All on-board meals 

Accommodations

Your cabin on the Ocean Nova

Miawpukek: Where Mi’kmaw Culture Lives On

At the mouth of the Conne River lies Miawpukek, whose Mi’kmaw name means “Middle River.” Long used as a seasonal gathering place, it became a permanent community around 1822 and today is the only recognized First Nation reserve on the island of Newfoundland. Its history is part of a much older pattern of movement throughout Mi’kma’ki, the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq.

Miawpukek is also a story of cultural strength and contemporary renewal. Language, traditional knowledge, education, ceremony, and community life remain closely connected, while present-day conservation initiatives carry an enduring responsibility to the surrounding lands and waters forward in new ways.

Receive a formal welcome from community leaders and spend time in Miawpukek, where history is not confined to the past but continues through living culture, modern leadership, and a relationship with place sustained across generations.

Included Meals

All on-board meals 

Accommodations

Your cabin on the Ocean Nova

Francois: A Fjord-Side Outport Reached Only by Sea

Tucked deep inside a steep-walled fjord, the outport of Francois can be reached only by boat. Colourful homes cling to the hillside, and the sea is still the only way in or out. Hike out to waterfalls and lookout trails, wander the lanes of the settlement, and take time to talk with the people who still make their lives here.

As evening falls on our Newfoundland Circumnavigation, we usually gather with the community for a kitchen party: fiddles, dancing, stories and laughter, all flowing as easily as the tide. Raise a glass and join in.

Included Meals

All on-board meals 

Accommodations

Your cabin on the Ocean Nova

The South Coast: Where the Sea Becomes the Highway

Along Newfoundland’s southern edge, the roads run out and the sea takes over as the highway. Deep fjords, sheltered coves and towering headlands shape a coast defined by water, weather and distance. Its outports and resettled communities hold a special place in Newfoundland’s cultural memory. They carry the stories of generations who were connected to the rest of the island mostly by boat.

The coastal barrens and bogs bloom with low wildflowers. Seabirds gather along the cliffs and out over the water. When the capelin run, whales may follow them into the bays. Bald eagles patrol the headlands, seals pop up in quiet coves, and waterfalls pour down the rock after the spring thaw.

Remote, roadless and known best by the sea, the South Coast is one of Newfoundland’s wildest places.

Included Meals

All on-board meals 

Accommodations

Your cabin on the Ocean Nova

Gros Morne: Where the Earth’s Mantle Meets the Sky

In Gros Morne National Park, the Earth’s story is written in stone. The rusty, bronze-coloured slopes of the Tablelands are made of rock pushed up from deep inside the Earth’s mantle. It’s some of the evidence that helped change how we understand plate tectonics. Walk this bare, otherworldly landscape with Parks Canada naturalists, and learn why Gros Morne is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Afterward, we slow down in Woody Point, a small harbour town with a big creative heart. Artists, writers and musicians have long found inspiration here, between the mountains and the sea.

Included Meals

All on-board meals 

Accommodations

Your cabin on the Ocean Nova

Red Bay: Labrador’s Basque Whaling Past

In the 1500s, Red Bay was a busy hub of Basque whaling. Every season, ships crossed the Atlantic to this Labrador harbour, linking it with communities an ocean away. Today it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and one of the best-preserved records of an early transatlantic industry.

At the interpretation centre, see artifacts recovered from the San Juan, a Basque whaling ship lost in the harbour in 1565. Tools, fittings and small personal belongings bring the crew surprisingly close. Then we cross to Saddle Island to walk among the remains of the whaling station. Picture the people, the ships, the know-how and the trade that once filled these waters, centuries before most of North America appeared on European maps.

Included Meals

All on-board meals 

Accommodations

Your cabin on the Ocean Nova

L’Anse aux Meadows: Where the Vikings Landed

At the northern tip of Newfoundland, in a landscape shaped by some 6,000 years of Indigenous presence, a cluster of low, grassy ridges turned out to hold one of the great stories of Atlantic history.

L’Anse aux Meadows is the only authenticated Norse site in the Americas, and the earliest known evidence of Europeans on this continent. Its discovery proved that Norse seafarers reached North America around the year 1000. Until then, the voyage survived only in the Icelandic sagas.

Walk among the outlines of turf-and-timber halls, workshops and a forge. They were built the same way as Norse settlements in Greenland and Iceland. Here, the Norse smelted bog iron, the first known iron production by Europeans in North America. Then there are the butternuts. They don’t grow in Newfoundland, which means someone sailed farther south and brought them back.

The Norse didn’t stay long. But what they left behind turned a centuries-old saga into history, and earned L’Anse aux Meadows its place as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Included Meals

All on-board meals 

Accommodations

Your cabin on the Ocean Nova

Newfoundland’s Northeast Coast: Harbour by Harbour

Sailing Newfoundland’s northeast coast on our Newfoundland Circumnavigation, you’ll find communities that have always faced the sea. Depending on the weather and what the day offers, we’ll visit small fishing communities where boats gather in sheltered coves and the wharf remains a natural place for conversation.

Spend time ashore and get to know the people who live here. Look for the small details of coastal life: weathered fishing stages and sheds, working boats pulled up to the wharf, a tune drifting out of a kitchen window, and the quick, dry wit Newfoundlanders are known for. Harbour by harbour, another side of the island reveals itself.

Included Meals

All on-board meals 

Accommodations

Your cabin on the Ocean Nova

Back to St. John’s: The Circle Closes

Return through the Narrows and beneath Signal Hill, completing a full circle around Newfoundland. St. John’s may appear much as it did at the beginning, but its colourful houses now sit within a broader palette of landscapes, stories, and communities encountered around the island.

Along the way, the sea has been more than a backdrop. It connects distant shores, sustains communities, shapes traditions, and finds its way into Newfoundland’s music and song. From lively harbours to roadless coastlines, the island’s character is grounded in the strength, wit, creativity, and warmth of its people.

Twelve days and an entire island later, the circle closes where it began, with the Narrows ahead and a whole island’s worth of stories, songs, and good company astern. As they say in Newfoundland, long may your big jib draw.

Included Meals

Breakfast