Bay of Fundy Revisited

We woke up under sunny skies for a change but with a temperature of only 2oC. By the time we left around 9 it had already warmed up considerably, relatively speaking. Eric seems to have friends in every nook & cranny of the east coast and today we were invited for lunch at a friend’s house whose only address was Pembroke Wharf Road, without a particular town.

The Yellow Dot Is No Bee; It’s Eric

No number either as they are the only people on the road on top of a hill overlooking the Bay of Fundy.

High Tide

This photo was taken during the winter of 2014

On the way we passed several small conservative looking towns each one with their own claim to fame: “Canada’s Soccer Capital” and “The Bird Watching Capital of Nova Scotia” or ”World Famous Home of the Scallop”. Not to be outdone each church had a slogan of its own:

“1 Cross + 3 Nails = 4 Given”.

“7 days without prayer makes 1 weak”.

“A bad day at work is better than a good day in hell.”

I’m sure you get the picture of the overall ambience. We arrived at low tide and were barely able to see water about 5 km from the shore. As mentioned previously, the highest tides in the world are found in the Bay of Fundy with a 55 ft. difference between high and low tide.

Low tide at the Bay

We revisited the Bay but this time on the other side, no less spectacular. Eric’s friends really live in the middle of nowhere. It is great to visit but forget about living there, especially in the winters. Because the ferry from Digby to St John left at 4 p.m. we only had about a 1-½ hour to chat before climbing on the bikes again. Our timing proved to be perfect with 15 minutes to spare. The 3-hour journey across the Bay ended up taking 4 hours due to rescue of a fisherman who got injured badly on his boat and had to be brought to hospital.

It was obvious the crew had not practiced this exercise for a while but all in all they did a commendable job hauling the injured man aboard after having to lower one of the sloops with a stretcher to meet up with the fishing boat. Emergency response was swift. A Navy 4 engine propeller plane also circled overhead. As so often happens, when there is something worthwhile filming you run out of battery power.

Most of the action had to be taken with the wide angled Go Pro. St John did not look that appealing and we pushed on until 9 p.m. when we found a very nice motel right on the mouth of the Bay. Fortunately there was still a restaurant open serving fresh fried clams and scallops. It was a fitting end to the last of the seafood binge.