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Coastal Nova Scotia Columnist |
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Coastline Filled With History
By Peter Loveridge
Of the couple of thousand pleasure boat owners in the province, the majority live in or close to Halifax Regional Municipality and travel extensively between Halifax and Mahone Bay. For this article, I will describe some of the interesting places I have found in my three decades of sailing the coast of Nova Scotia that are outside this area, as if on a voyage from west to east.
Seal Island is the southernmost of a group of islands in Shelburne County, 15 miles west of Clarks Harbour. It is 24 miles from my house, and a challenging place to visit because of the strong tides, the lack of sheltered anchorages, and the unpredictable weather. This place is outside the range of the weather radar station in Halifax, and a constant eye has to be kept on the weather. A return day trip to it in a slow sailboat is a 16-hour affair or an overnight stay in a very uncertain anchorage.
None the less, it is a fascinating place. It was continuously inhabited from 1840 to 1992. There are still a number of cottages used as summer residences and for the winter lobster fishery. The world’s smallest museum, a six-foot by eight-foot hut, details life on the island. The east side of the island has a sandy beach decorated by the slowly rusting remains of a small cargo ship. On a good day, the place has a spectacular beauty not found anywhere else in the province. Anyone coming from the west towards Halifax has to round Cape Sable, a low sandbank, some four miles south of Clarks Harbour.
The tallest lighthouse on the East Coast is on its southern tip and it stands up as you approach, visible for 20 miles on a clear day, seemingly completely detached from the land. There aren’t many clear days as the coldest water in the province, usually 6ºC or less even in September, makes for one of the foggiest places in the world. Given the ferocious tides and rips, the place has a reputation as the roughest bit of water on the east coast. It forms a natural barrier that many sailors in the province will not pass. I have rounded it over 60 times, and managed to anchor and go on its shores once in thirty years. There is the most spectacular beach in the province. Perfectly semi-circular and about three miles long, you and maybe a few birders will have the only footprints on it in any given year. The area remains a favoured habitat for all sorts of birds.
A popular stop for the night after rounding the Cape is the anchorage at Cape Negro Island. This is a bay formed by a sand and pebble beach between two islands. The island is now uninhabited but was settled for most of the previous two centuries. In the depression between the two sandbars is a permanent fresh-water pond. This has its own population of frogs, which must have been there for a very long time, as they can’t survive in salt water. There is an old graveyard on the north island, and the land to it from the anchorage has been deeded in perpetuity to the province, so it is safe from the depredations of real estate developers.
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