August 11, 2015  To Jeddore Harbour

      Our first navigation task of the day was only yards from our anchorage, where we crept thru a narrow dog-leg passage from “Cardinal Bay” into Popes Harbor. All was as the GPS chart showed it was in that passage and we continued down Popes Harbor to head thru another small channel, just South of Sally's Cove. The Southerly swells were still rolling in and I idled way down to go thru this cut. We had hardly entered the channel when I saw a swirl in the water a boat length ahead! Full reverse! We stopped and our prop wash streamed out ahead of us mixing with the swirl of the swell going over a rock! Another 5 seconds and we would have been hard aground. This was the first time in over 1000 miles that we had found fault with the GPS information.

      I later shared my near-miss with another boater, to remain un-named, and he said, “That's the rock I hit last summer!” As soon as I figure out how to do it, there will be a point of interest on the chart for that spot. We don't want to bother that rock any more.

      Having lost my taste of adventure for a bit, we headed toward the offshore route for the rest of the day. We were on a good line for Halifax Harbor, but a strong SW wind came in, and in combination of the still large swell it was a little on the uncomfortable side, so we decided to run for Jeddore Harbor. This was an easy downwind leg, bringing us into the river entrance.

      Jeddore has a curious topography. One hundred fifty foot high eroding banks of gravel greet us at the entrance, then a narrow, but 50 foot deep, channel with hidden sand bars on either side. This 250 foot wide channel continues over 4 miles in then opens to a wide bay to the East and a smaller bay to the West. We choose the West side called Jeddore Oyster Pond and again anchored alone. The sand bar configuration looks like that of a dredged channel where the spoils were just put off to the side, but I doubt this 50 foot deep channel was ever dredged by man. The other thing it resembles is as though the sand was placed by current coming into the bay, instead of the normal deposits made by an outgoing river current. Hmm, musings of an armchair geologist. Well up in the bay there are a few spruce covered islands, very small, which look like uneven granite blocks were piled up there. If there wasn't soil on them enuf to support trees I would have thot they were man made also.

      Part of the reason to anchor where we did was that in one of the tourism pamphlets that we had picked up somewhere along the way that if we anchored in this area we might just be greeted in the morning with fresh muffins and a paper. Not a lot of activity save for a guy hand mowing several yards, and he obviously isn't making muffins.

Note from Kathy:  again, no photos here... the weather was a little on the rainy side and the photos don't really capture the raw beauty when everything is shrouded in shades of gray.