Miles 266 (6580)
Two Lanes 164 (5327) 81%
Top Down 0 (5717) 87%
Day 22: Crossing the Cabot Strait.
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Up early to board the M V. Caribou of the Atlantic Maritime Fleet from Port aux Basques back to North Sydney, Nova Scotia. The ship is 587 feet long and runs at about 20 mph. It carries 370 cars, 77 tractor trailers, and up to 1,200 passengers.
The trip crosses the ‘narrow neck’ of water between southern Newfoundland and northern Nova Scotia called the Cabot Strait. It is 110 miles across and takes about 6 hours for the Caribou to cross. Today she entered fog quickly after leaving Port aux Basques. We listened to the soft moan of her foghorn as we looked out at the never changing view. Visibility was about 50 feet. I was grateful for radar and GPS. Sailors before about 1950 did not have radar. It was invented by and for military use in WW II and did not get into non-military ships until the fifties.
The crossings are not always six hours long. This ferry is the year round link between Newfoundland and the mainland of North America. I spoke with Charlotte, who works in the coffee shop on board. She lives in Port aux Basques and traveled the ferry long before she worked on it. Our crossing was very smooth. I asked her what the crossings are like in the winter.
“It can be bad. The worst are the high winds and seas. But then there is the ice.”
“Ice…across this wide strait?”
“Oh yes. Sometimes up to three feet thick. Now these are icebreakers: Northern Baltic Class 1A. They are built to do it. One time it took us 18 hours to cross.”
Quickly doing some math in my head I said, “ That’s still about 6 knots through the ice.”
“Well that may be the average but it’s really more of going forward fast, ramming the ice, backing up and doing it again, over and over and over. The sound of the ice scraping along the hull is God-awful. And then it again it doesn’t always work. In April of 2008 the Smallwood got stuck in the ice and had to be rescued by Canadian naval ice breakers.”
Now that would be a crossing to tell your grandkids about.
After our arrival in Nova Scotia our route to Halifax took us within a couple of miles of Alexander Graham Bell’s Nova Scotia summer home. Born in Scotland, he immigrated to the US and became a citizen with his family as a young man when he was ill with tuberculosis. He recovered (his two brothers died). He invented the telephone at the age of 36 and went from rags to riches overnight. H did not consider himself a professional inventor like Edison. In fact, Bell often lost interest in an invention once he created it, and left the further development and marketing to others. What he really enjoyed was improving the inventions of others: for example, he improved Edison’s phonograph to there it could become a household item and he invented ailerons so airplanes could turn.
But what he considered to be his greatest achievement was work he did to help the deaf learn to speak. He was a contemporary and close friend of Helen Keller.
As we left it started to rain hard, and the top was up the whole day. Bummer.
Then into the fog of Halifax. It seemed like San Francisco. Halifax has been and still is a major naval port. During WW II convoys would assemble here before crossing the North Atlantic with supplies, troops and equipment. My father visited Halifax on his LST in 1943 before heading to Europe. We had a great dinner of halibut stew and a pint of Propeller Porter, then to bed.
Bound for Nova Scotia
Leaving the "Island", or as some locals aptly call it, the "Rock"
Arrival in Halifax (or is this San Francisco in the summer!)
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