These ancient, almost mythical chunks of ice fuel an unlikely industry built upon the faith that berg water is just the tip of a commercial iceberg
David Meyers, the chief executive of Canadian Iceberg Vodka, a spirit made with water harvested from icebergs off Newfoundland’s coast, was meeting with a colleague at his office in Toronto’s northeast end on a snowy February morning, when the phone rang.
Police in Newfoundland continue to investigate the iceberg water whodunit, a heist that made international headlines and went viral on social media, but have yet to produce any concrete leads. What makes the mystery so appealing is the substance that was stolen: a precious liquid, of sorts, tapped from massive hunks of floating ice that, in their immensity, exude an almost mythic quality.
The industry has attracted a Saudi prince, failed politicians and former beach bums despite having just one certainty: the natural resource it relies upon disappears by September 1, only to return anew the following year, when another batch of bergs, typically 400 to 800 a season, drifts down Newfoundland’s coast for tourists to behold — and dreamers and schemers to try to profit from.
Unlike other Newfoundland novelties, such as being screeched in at the pub, the iceberg industry is not for the financially or physically faint of heart. Kean harvests about 1,000 tons of ice a summer — Iceberg Vodka is by far his largest client — using a 100-foot-long custom barge, aptly named the Ice Harvester, outfitted with a grappling hook. The grapple breaks off ice chunks, which are fed into an ice grinder and then stored in tanks. The ideal iceberg for harvesting is about the size of a medium-sized house.
Isaacs’ career arc took him from being present at nuclear test sites and studying blast waves, to hypothesizing that towing Antarctic icebergs up the Pacific Coast and anchoring them off Catalina Island might solve California’s chronic water scarcity problem in the agro-industrial sector. “Water delivered to Saudi Arabia, however, would be used for human consumption and high technology, and could command far greater prices.”
Stamp had left home at 17 to drive a truck in Toronto, before realizing that what he was really good at was talking, and so he switched to sales before leaving sales to be a beach bum in Jamaica. “I was the first person to make a vodka out of an iceberg or bottled water out of an iceberg, and that can’t be taken back from me,” Stamp said.
“Getting into a conflict with the harvesters — that kind of a scenario — it is real,” said Cecil Stockley, who operates MV Iceberg Alley, an iceberg/whale-watching vessel out of Twillingate, Nfld. “My opinion was, and always has been, that we should allow an iceberg to break down naturally. Tourists, especially in a place like Twillingate, the last thing you want to see is the harvesters crunching up an iceberg with all their machinery.
For now, the iceberg détente remains, and the icebergs continue to attract new dreamers to the industry.
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