In August 2005 I took Marian and Brenna on a whirlwind tour of the Maritime provinces. When I was planning it, my friend Colleen said we must visit Grand Manan Island. She and her partner had camped on a cliff at Hole-in-the-Wall Park and heard whales breaching in the night.
So that is exactly what we did. We never saw the whales, but heard them at night. When fog moved in around 4 a.m., a foghorn started groaning from a nearby point, filling our dreams. In the morning we saw seals entering the weir net below our campsite to catch fish.
Fine rain fell most of the day and two nights we spent on the island. At Southwest Head we hiked along another cliff. We could hear sea waves thundering at the foot, almost invisible through the mist. At Seal Cove, a fishing village hardly changed since the 19th Century, I photographed water droplets on a huge spider web. In the middle of an August week, there were few tourists, and we had the campground practically to ourselves.
All the island was the colours of this square.
On the trip we saw much beauty and enjoyed much hospitality, especially from my Nova Scotia aunt and her family. But Grand Manan Island was our favourite part of the trip, this despite the wet weather. Any tour of the Maritimes would be incomplete without a visit. Grand Manan Island is part of New Brunswick, but off the coast of Maine in the Bay of Fundy. It is reached by a two-hour ferry trip from Blacks Harbour.
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