Ripple Effect
Ye Olde Argyler Lodge occupies an envi- able perch steps from Lobster Bay; its spacious dining hall, wide wraparound verandahs and grassy lawns overlook sunset views of the bay’s sleeping is- lands. Fresh sea air wafts across a clean cobble beach. Lockyer knew the moment he saw the lodge that he had found the Bay of Fundy Sea Kayak Symposium’s home base.
Flung on the very tip of Southwest
Nova Scotia, Argyle, Yarmouth and the neighboring villages of the Acadian Shore occupy a scenic but socioeconomically depressed hinterland between the Bay of Fundy proper, and the province’s more prosperous South Shore. Although the lo- cal lobster and scallop fisheries survived the early 1990s Atlantic groundfishery collapse, like the rise and fall of the tides that inform all aspects of Maritime life, an ebb was coming. When the ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Yarmouth ceased operation in 2009, it gutted the region’s all-important summer tourist economy. With the BOFSKS, Lockyer, the organiz- ing committee and their municipal tour- ism partners hope to help turn the tide. “There’s phenomenal paddling here,
it’s just taken 15 years for the rest of the world to discover it,” Sue Hutchins, a local photographer, avid expedition pad- dler and Maine transplant, tells me over a plate of the lodge’s fresh Fundy haddock and scallops au gratin. I learn about the fog-shrouded drumlins of the Tusket Islands, of Brier Island’s sheer cliffs and nutrient-rich waters teaming with whales and seabirds. Witness firsthand the hospitality of the proud Acadian French people who have lived and worked on these shores since 1653. Indeed, it is the warmth and generos- ity of the locals—more so even than the skills of the coaches or the sublimity of the paddling environs—that sets BOF- SKS apart. After three days—heck, three hours—I feel like a member of the family. The initial impact of our modest
kayaking clan gathering here for a long weekend may not be enormous, but the lasting effects are immeasurable. “You are 130 stones sending your ripples far into the pond,” Lockyer tells the paddlers gathered on the Argyler’s lawn, “spread the word, tell your friends.”
Fame and Forchu
Cape Forchu’s fishing sheds lean with silvered siding and vacant windows into the wind, awaiting Dumping Day, the late-November start of lobster season. Brightly painted trawlers rest at drunken angles on drying sandbars. Swell rolling out of the Atlantic booms against the cape’s polished cliffs, sending spray far above our heads. I’ve joined Matt Nelson and Jaime Sharp, along with a handful of daring
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Sometimes it’s fruitless to argue with fate; riding the swell-evator at Cape Forchu; wherever you stand, there’s plenty to see in Fundy.
TRIP PLANNER
Bay of Fundy Sea Kayak Symposium 2014 September 12–15, 2014 Lower Argyle, Nova Scotia
www.bofsks.com
students, for a rock-hopping session around the cape. This tour, like all of the symposium’s most demanding sessions, is rated comfortable intermediate, rather than advanced, because as Lockyer will later explain, “We wanted to stay away from that scratch-your-balls, bang-your- chest connotation.” Matt is showing participants Jerome
Trottier and Ted Tibbetts how to ride the “swell-evator”—dancing nimbly up and down the cliff face with the surging rise and sucking fall of the ocean swell. The classic symposium stigmas—overstated conditions, underwhelming classes, inflated egos—fall away like seawater down the rocks. There is such a wealth of expertise, abundance of beautiful coast and variety of challenge here; it’s all but impossible to be disappointed. While the rough water classes enjoy ideal sea conditions, the weekend’s surf sessions find little action on area beaches. Johanne Lavoie, an adventurous Montreal paddler who counts her city’s high-volume Lachine Rapids as a favorite after-work sea kayaking spot, found her Surfing in Style class relocated to the
sheltered waters of Lobster Bay, along- side the event’s milder sessions. “Nick [Cunliffe] started the class with edging our boats on flatwater and I thought ‘F***, not this again! Is this all we’re going to do?’” she tells me later that afternoon, “But then he added a small correction, and then another and another—he kept me busy.” When Cunliffe moved their practice to an area of swift tidal currents and swirling eddies, says Lavoie, “It was the perfect progression.” Lockyer is enormously pleased with the first annual BOFSKS. As the weekend winds down, he’s already sharing the event’s 2014 dates with participants and coaches, and wondering what effects their small ripples will have on his be- loved bay. The tide, it seems, is turning. The Bay of Fundy is many things—world-
class and down-home, brutal and beautiful, intimate and enigmatic, pantry and play- ground—but it’s no longer a secret.
DIGITAL EXTRA: Click here to watch
a teaser from Justine Curgenven’s film, Fundy Fun.
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