NOVA SCOTIA

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Now I have seen some strange place-names on my travels, that's for sure, but the one just here is definitely the one that takes the biscuit to date.

It intrigued me, why they had singled this island out for special attention by giving it this particular name. The idea that there might be drunken islands lurching around in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast here was rather a sobering thought.

But then again, maybe not. This coast is infamous for the amount of maritime accidents, collisions and sinkings of vessels and all that kind of thing, and this might explain it. Can you imagine a Lloyd's of London claims form?
"Reason for running aground" - "A drunken island staggered across my track without looking and I had to swerve in order to avoid a collision"

Not only that, we've often heard claims of trees and buildings swerving into the paths of unsuspecting motorists. With the hundreds, if not thousands, of ships that have disappeared without trace off the North American coast over the past 500 years, running aground on a drunken island that has staggered into one's path has to be as credible an explanation as the persistent legend of the Bermuda Triangle.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, with a name like Sober Island, the place had to be worth a visit and so off I toddled down the road in a south-easterly direction.

But I hadn't gone far when I encountered this. It is advertised as being some kind of greenhouse complex, growing tomatoes apparently, according to a very weather-beaten sign at the boundary of the property. With all of the heaters and ventilators, there's obviously been heavy investment here but just look at it all. Something serious has happened here to have caused all of that damage.

It's puzzling too why the place hasn't been rebuilt. No income will be generated with the place sitting there like that. All of that expensive machinery just there exposed to the elements won't be doing any good at all and the salvage value will be decreasing day by day if they don't cover it up.

But then again, trying to grow tomatoes in a place like this must be a pretty thankless task. I can't ever seem to be able to make them grow chez moi

And on that note, I finally arrived at Sober island and that's it just over there across the causeway.

Now I can't decide whether or not its name comes from the "sober" that means "not intoxicated" or the "sober" that means "staid and respectable" and so I'll leave that up to you to decide.

However, one definition of "staid" is "sedate", and another definition of "sober" is "exhibiting a great degree of self-control", and that causeway is certainly preventing the island from moving about the ocean and creating havoc with the passing maritime transport.

Over there is East River, which is an official port run by the Government of Nova Scotia, so I'm told.

Judging by all of the activity that is going on there and all of the items at the quayside - the hoppers, the solidly-built conveyor system, the piles of sand and so on, it would be a reasonable guess to suppose that it all has some kind of connection with a very large quarry somewhere in the vicinity.

One of the benefits of having a really decent camera and a high-quality lens is that you can crop and enlarge small sections from other images without losing much in the way of quality. Hence I can crop a section out of the previous image in order to enable us to have a better look at the ship at the quayside.

Now I remember from my voyages around the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s that beluga is something to do with caviare, but I bet that it's not cavaire that they are loading or unloading over there.

In fact, Beluga Projects relates to a shipping concern based in Bremen in Germany, operating a fleet of what is described as "heavy lift cargo" vessels. I was going to ask them more about themselves and their shps but unfortunately the company was declared "Judicially Insolvent" in March 2011, and so that is that.

But the harbour over there is not the only exciting thing to see around here. The road into the town of Sheet Harbour had its attractions too

Like that ship over there, for example. She has certainly seen better days and there has to be a story about a ship that is moored up in that kind of condition. It's difficult to imagine what could be the purpose of keeping what can only be described from a casual glance at this distance as "a rusting hulk" moored up in a place like this.

There's a tarpaulin thrown over part of the ship so it's clear that someone is taking some kind of interest in it regardless of its apparent state. I shall have to see if I can work my way over to it to have a closer look.

As an aside, looking at the map it seems that I drove past here in 2003 but I don't recall seeing this ship, even though she looks as if she has been here for 100 years. Mind you, I don't recall very much of anything from my voyage back then so who knows?

Crossing the river was not much of a problem. There was this absolutely magnificent bow arch bridge, called with some imagination the "East River Bridge" that spanned the river just here and that was worth a photograph all on its own.

I have quite an affinity with bridges as you probably know, and combined with my anger management issues it's all rather confusing. In fact, every time I see a decent bridge it makes me cross, but that is by the way.

Someone told me an interesting yarn about the bridge. apparently there are all kinds of manholes - "personholes" ...ed - and the like built into the bridge and the kids from the area used to use it as the venue for games of hide-and-seek and so on.

And so having dealt with the bridge let us turn our attention back to the ship which, incidentally, is called the Hawk. I couldn't approach it for it's moored up (and well moored up too, if you look) on a private harbour with no access to the public.

Clambering over fences is not something that I do too much of these days, at least in broad daylight in populated areas (although on other occasions in other places I am not so restrained ) and so, with no-one about upon whom I could work my persuasive wiles I was obliged to restrict my examination to one of a cursory nature undertaken from a distance.

There isn't much more that I can add to what I have already seen. There are no marks of collision or anything like that that I could see, and she doesn't seem to have been fired. The only thing that I could think of, given her rather sad condition, is that she had sunk and been subsequently refloated.

With no-one here to ask, I set off into the town to make enquiries. And with no newspaper office, the Public Library seemed to be the obvious choice. One of the employees was rather garrulous and told me a story of the ship. And her story is that which I repeat, with no guarantee or warranty of its veracity

According to our librarian friend, the Hawk sailed unannounced into the harbour about 5 years ago from Newfoundland and the crew of young persons "scattered like rats" (these were her exact words and they made such an impression on me that I wrote them down as soon as I left the building) as soon as she docked. The police arrived and, suspecting drugs or some such, searched the ship thoroughly but found nothing. The police then departed but the Hawk stayed, and here she sits.

I expressed surprise that the town council or the maritime authorities had allowed the ship to remain, seeing as she was to my untutored eye in no fit condition to go back out to sea, to which she replied that the Hawk is moored at a private mooring and the authorities have no power to oblige the owner of the mooring to move it on. He is happy to keep it there, especially as he is being paid the mooring fees.
"But who would pay five years worth of mooring fees to keep a ship such as that?" was the obvious question, and so I put it to my correspondent
"that question has been asked many times" she replied "but the owner of the mooring says that this is no business of anyone else but him" - and quite rightly so, in my opinion.

In case you missed it the first time, just let me repeat that the above is what I was told by someone working in the library at Sheet Harbour. It's an accurate record of what was said, but as to the veracity of the story I make no warranty.

Judging by the above remarks it seems that there is a great deal of local hostility to the presence of the ship in Sheet Harbour. The local councillor, Steve Steach, told me that the townspeople had presented a petition to the local council to request that the ship be moved. However this is apparently a matter for central Government and the petition was passed to Robert MacKay, the local MP.

Others preferred direct action and in April 2009 the mooring ropes were cut by person or persons unknown, and the ship was cast adrift in the harbour. Of course, there are two major problems with direct action

1. those people so involved have no regard for the consequences of their actions and it was only by good luck that a catastrophe in the harbour was averted. Had the Hawk collided with another vessel it might have caused considerable financial loss to an innocent third party and had it collided with the bridge the consequences would have been even worse.
2. it's nothing but NIMBYism of the worst kind. The people doing the cutting didn't care about the damage that it might do to other people's property or to the bridge - anything belonging to anyone else is fair game as long as they get what they want. It's NIMBYs like this who are really the scourge of society and deserve to be cast adrift in a harbour at the mercy of the tides and currents, not a ship moored up at a quayside

I continued my enquiries for a while anyway, without making too much progress, but eventually I received a rather terse message "the ship is no longer there" and that brought my enquiries to a shuddering halt.

But I would gladly learn more of the affair of the Hawk and so if you have any further information to impart, please don't hesitate to .

Sheet Harbour had a lot to offer for itself, as I discovered during my perambulations around the town. One of the objects that caught my eye was the local Foodland franchise here. I was running low on bread and salad in the stock of food in Casey, but this place saved my bacon, for the franchise is held by a guy called Gammon.

On the way up to here I noticed a few places with names such as Gammon's Point, Gammon's River and Gammon's Turn-off, this kind of thing, and so it would seem that the Gammons around here may well have been some of the original settlers in the area. Perhaps they arrived on the Mayflower, or maybe on the Hector. I dunno.

Controlling the food supplies is just as important as controlling the media when it comes to controlling the population, as anyone connected with the genetic manipulation of crops will tell you. One of the aims of the big GMO companies is to not only make their seeds sterile but to interbreed with other similar types of plant to render their seeds sterile as well. In 20 years time there will only be four suppliers of seeds in the whole world, and what do you think will happen to the price of foodstuffs then? And you think that you have problems with oil prices.

In the meantime I'll go back to controlling the media in the Combrailles. I'm happy that way.

While I was prowling around the town I noticed some kind of waterfall that looked reasonably accessible, so now that the weather has improved and the sun has come out, I'm up for a bit of scrambling through trees and down rock-slides and all this kind of thing to get to the bottom of this.

These falls are called Some Scotsman's Falls - well, that's what I said on my dictaphone at the time anyway. I suppose that they have a real name somewhere and maybe someone might to tell me what it is.

I managed to follow them down all the way from the road bridge up there at the top of the photo and it was well-worth the effort if you ask me. It really is quite beautiful here and now that the sun has put in an appearance I'm quite cheered up.

Leaving Sheet Harbour the road took me on for a few miles past all kinds of places that might have been picturesque under normal conditions but just recently I had seen so much of what is beautiful that I was starting to become rather selective of what it was that I was photographing.

I did however manage to bring myself to yet another shuddering stop at a place called Ship Harbour. Ship Harbour is an inlet that goes some way inland and the road runs all the way around it.

It's yet another place that is tied firmly to the sea as you might expect and there's yet another jetty just here that looks as if it might be quite new. That's the second new jetty that I've seen around here just recently so it seems that the locals must be of the opinion that the marine harvest is not dead quite yet.

The major issue here though was the sun. It's the afternoon right now and the sun is well into the west and shining right into the lens of the camera, which is disappointing. Everywhere that I've driven along just here where there has been a beautiful view, I've been confronted by the sun.

Sooner or later though there's an overhanging mountain or two that act as a useful screen and at one such location there was a suitably-bucolic view of a typical maritime-coast scenery. There was even a handy parking place to stop and take a photo.

Yes, a parking place. The days when I could simply park in the centre of the road and take a photo - they are long gone. I'm approaching Halifax and civilisation, and there's a fair amount of traffic around.

There's a road - well, a track, really - around the other side of the inlet that leads down to a place called Little Harbour and I went for a drive down there. And of course there is no trouble with the sun at all because it's shining from behind me over my left shoulder.

Right over there is the brow of the hill where I first burst onto the scene a few minutes ago and where I took the photo of that jetty, which you can make out in the distance. You can see how beautiful it all is over there.

When you think about it, it's taken me a good 10 minutes to drive around this inlet (I can tell that from the times of the exposures of the photographs) and it's probably only a couple of hundred metres across the water. Maybe the new jetty isn't for fishing at all but is for an informal ferry service. A case of paddling your own canoe, methinks.

Which reminds me - why is it against the law to light a fire in a canoe?
Well, you can't have your kayak and heat it.

I'll get my coat.

The detour down to Little Harbour was well worth it, that's for sure. Little Harbour is an absolutely beautiful place to visit and it looked as if it might be a thriving little port, with all the fishing boats here, as well as what looked like a few pleasure craft, such as might be owned by the more wealthy inhabitants of Halifax who might come here for a quiet weekend relaxing on the water and getting away from it all.

At the moment though there was absolutely no-one around, even though according to my calculations it was a Saturday afternoon. I was on my own just here with nothing but a pile of empty lobster pots for company.

Yes, they are definitely lobster pots, although how ever you would persuade a lobster to "go" on one of those I really do not know.

The impressive thing about this photo is that it sums up everything that there is to know about Little Harbour and this part of the maritime coast of Canada.

1. There's absolutely no-one about at all as I said, but this guy has left his shed door open. He has no concern at all that someone might come along and help themselves to all of his equipment. Just imagine that in the UK! I wouldn't give his possessions 5 minutes.
2. Look how his shed is supported - it's based on oil drums filled with concrete and with wooden legs sunk therein. The oil drum will eventually rust away but the concrete cylinder will still be intact. It's a sytem that I can see myself adopting. A Heath-Robinson system of course - what the French would call Système D - and this has always been the basis of life in outlying areas such as this. What in wartime used to be called "Make-do and Mend", and it's high time that society returned to all of these kind of values instead of constantly throwing away useful stuff and wasting precious natural resources on new, more-fashionable items.
3. One of the legs has broken off and not been replaced. People are becoming increasingly less-concerned about the long-term viability of places such as this and are not attending to matters that might prolong the life of the property along here. In 10 years time there will be nothing left to fish and so they won't be coming here any more. The expense of repairing the hut just isn't worth it.

After my delightful little excursion down to Little Harbour I rejoin Marine Drive - Highway 7 - and this brings me to the salt flats and wetlands at the Head of Jeddore.

Now salt flats and wetlands are not really the kind of thing that you would associate with the Nova Scotia coast around here but at least it just goes to prove that Nova Scotia has everything to offer for most kinds of tourists.

You can see the Atlantic surf crashing in the distance onto the rocks away in the distance and that ought to be of some attraction to surfers, with nothing out there except the coast of Ireland 1900 miles away.

With the excellent surfing conditions at the Head of Jeddore, the exciting part about this area of the Nova Scotia coast is that there seems to be something for everyone. And if my idea of a Piracy Theme Park is taken up, then everyone really will be catered. I can just imagine some of the really realistic dialogue -
"Aaarrr Long John! Where are your buccaneers?"
"Aaarrr Jim-Lad! They are underneath my buccan hat!"

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