The Canada I miss

A Misty Nova Scotia Day in North Carolina

Raymond's Gut on a Nova Scotia day

We have actually have been through a remarkable stretch of sunny but windy weather along the Crystal Coast, but Wednesday, May 18, 2016 reminded me a lot of a day in Nova Scotia. As my wife says it was one of those days that can happen in any maritime climate. We did not get much rain, but for much of the day the air was filled with mist.

When you live near the water, you can get caught in a damp pattern while areas just inland enjoy sunshine.  That very reason drove us to move from Nova Scotia the first time in the fall of 1974.  I tried farming along the shore of the Bay of Fundy and found that the weather made it very hard to make hay.  Often we would have a day of mist or fog while just inland from us, the temperatures would be in the eighties and people would be making hay.  We ended up moving north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  While it was only fifty or sixty miles from the Bay of Fundy instead of just a mile, we could count on good haying weather most of the time.  We needed it since we often put up five hundred or more tons of hay to feed our herd of 200 red and black Angus at Tay Ridge Angus.

Still there was something peaceful about a misty day along the shore.  Usually in Nova Scotia those misty days were cool ones since the Bay of Fundy barely got into the lower fifties during the middle of summer and often was in the forties.  You get used to cool weather but you miss warm weather and things that come with it.  Perhaps the climate has warmed some but back in the early seventies, tomatoes were a late August crop and corn was a challenge.  However you could grow five gallon buckets of broccoli and more English peas than you would think possible.

While we were lucky to have soil dry enough to garden in the heavy clay of the North Mountain by the end of May, where we live along the North Carolina coast, our spinach, lettuce and broccoli are already done until fall by mid-May. Summer is almost on us and we are looking forward to it and the visitors that it brings. Our water temperatures are already around seventy degrees so we rarely cool below the sixties this time of year.  However this has been a cool spring so we have seen the forties at least once and a few fifties.

Living in any coastal area will bring you closer to mother nature.  The weather can turn on a dime and can turn on you without much warning.  I was recently kayaking and a heavy rainstorm sneaked up on me. Fortunately it was a warm rain but I still got very wet and was reminded that storms can take different paths without telegraphing their moves.  While Nova Scotia never got very warm in summer, it also never reached the depths of cold that we saw in New Brunswick where winter often brought temperatures in the minus twenty Fahrenheit range and sometimes even bottomed out at minus forty.

It you look at the picture at the top of the post and squint your eyes enough to make our long leaf pines become spruce trees and turn the air conditioning down to about 65F, you might get some idea of a misty cool day in Nova Scotia.  Of course it would more likely be 45F in Nova Scotia but temperature is all relative. Fifty degrees this time of year on the NC coast feels like winter to me.  As my wife says, you would not feel that cold if you would give up the shorts and t-shirts and put on some clothes.  Come to think of it, I think wearing shorts along the Bay of Fundy was pretty much a rarity.

You can see some pictures of our farmstead and two hundred year old house at this link.

Playing What If With Water

White Oak River just north of Swansboro, NC

I have vivid memories from living in the Martimes from 1971 through 1987.

At the time I thought the blues and greens of Nova Scotia were unlike any that I had ever seen. 

Some of the snows we lived through in New Brunswick were truly epic storms that we will always remember and that grow deeper with each telling of the story.

In certain ways living north of the border was like rolling back the clock.  Life in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the seventies was much like growing up in North Carolina in the fifties.  Neighbors had a similar feeling of trust towards each other and children played outside with a freedom that is unheard of today.

Twenty-seven years later, I am living along North Carolina's Crystal Coast, another spot with amazing blues and greens.  I have changed a lot and so has the world arround me. My wife and I even wrote a book, A Taste for the Wild - Canada's Maritimes, about some of the changes that we noticed north of the border after a 2012 trip to our favorite part of Canada.

Hurricane Arthur recently brushed our area but went on to devastate parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Friends who have a farm just one mile from where we used to have our Tay Ridge Angus farm twenty miles north of Fredericton were without power for over a week and had tremendous damage to their woodlot.  Fredericton lost over 4,000 trees in the storm.

While our area on the coast of North Carolina is in general well prepared for hurricanes. New Brunswick is much better prepared for snow storms.  This started me wondering how my life would been different in Canada if I had lived on the North Carolina coast before I lived in the Maritimes.

One of the big differences in life here on the Southern Outer Banks is how much time we spend on the water.  In my case I am either kayaking, visiting the marshes, or out by the big water in our boat, a 20 ft. Sundance skiff.  The skiff was a new addition to our life after we moved here, but I have logged well over 225 hours in it and that does not count the countless hours bouncing at anchor someplace in Bogue Inlet.

When we lived in Nova Scota we were on the Bay of Fundy where tides are up to 28 feet. Here in Carteret county our tides are generally from 1.5 to 3 feet.  Much of the White Oak River and other water that we kayak on is less than three or four feet deep.  There are places where I float above the oyster rocks that the water is so shallow that the oyster rock is well above water at low tide.

When I think back to the waters that were part of my life in Canada, I am doubtful that having boated in the warm waters of Bogue Sound would be sufficient training for the harsh cold waters off of Canada's east coast or especially the huge tides and very cold waters of the Bay of Fundy.  The summer water temperatures of the Bay of Fundy are between 46F and 54F.  Our water temperature in the middle of July is 84F.  As a safety precaution I usually decline to kayak in water below 50F because while the water often looks very enticing in early spring, it can be deadly.  Sixty percent of the people who drown, drown in water that is below 50F.  I was pretty sure that the Bay of Fundy might not be a place that people would kayak, but I found a YouTube video of people doing just that.  Still I am not certain that I would.

I can still remember seeing fishing boats grounded in the mud at low tide in the Bay of Fundy.  Here on the shores of the White Oak River, we can have our skiff on a simple lift.  Obviously that is impossible on the Bay of Fundy, but certainly there are Nova Scotia lakes and spots in sheltered coves of the Atlantic where it would be possible. While I was able to find the YouTube video on kayaking easily, boating information seemed to be clogged up with boats for sale.  I did find that Nova Scotia has a tremendous number of boat launches so I am guessing there are lots of boats to go with them.

Likely the boating season in the Maritimes is much shorter than ours here on the North Carolina coast.  Our season actually stretches through all twelve months.  Usually our waters only get as cold as the Bay of Fundy for a few weeks during the winter and then warm quickly.  The heat captured by our waters helps us have a magnificent fall where we surf fish in warm waters and enjoy cool air temperatures.  Kayaking into December is something we count on here.  Often November is one of our best fishing months.

New Brunswick with large lakes and the Saint John River might be a better boating home than Nova Scotia, but then what about Prince Edward Island?  It did not take a lot of searching to figure out that Prince Edward Island is a premier boating and kayaking destination with summer water temperatures in the sixties.  While I might not do any swimming in 64F water, I would probably try kayaking and I certainly would feel comfortable in my skiff.

My guess is that if I had lived in coastal North Carolina before living in Canada, I might well have ended up in Prince Edward Island instead of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Now that would have been another interesting adventure.

 

Snow Storm Memories

Snowy barn in Tay Creek, New Brunswick

My wife has given up trying to understand or explain the changes that I have gone through. Today it is hard to convince me to leave the warmth of the Crystal Coast.

Forty years ago I loved the snow and was living in a very old farmhouse on the shores of the Bay of Fundy. Somehow I convinced the love of my life to leave family and friends and move to snowy Canada with me.

It did not take long for her to find out about snow.  We got married in the heat of August in North Carolina and just a little over a month later a surprise snowstorm of twelve inches hit our Nova Scotia farm that September. I wrote about that event in a post called, My Wife's First Nova Scotia Snow.

In those years snow was just another challenge to me. When we got married, I was actually in the midst of evaluating a move to Newfoundland. The western part where I was looking is a lot snowier than Nova Scotia but a trip up there with my new wife and a visit to the barrens by float plane put an end to that idea.

It is a great story and part of our book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes. The book talks about our early years in Canada and the changes we saw during a return trip we made to New Brunswick in the fall of 2012.

I have told a number of folks the story about the Newfoundland barrens and the drunken hunters at the moose camp there is worth every penny of the $2.99 price of the book.

Newfoundland got rejected not because it had too much snow but because it had too few trees and the long ferry ride made it too far away. We actually ended up in an even snowier place, Tay Creek, New Brunswick. The Google place marker actually is just to the left of our old farmhouse and the road that we had made out to the new barns we built for our cattle herd which eventually numbered over 200.

That first winter when we were in Tay Creek, I kept track of the snowfall. We had twenty three feet of snow that year. There were times when six feet of snow was on the ground in our fields.

Snow was part of life in Tay Creek. There was still some on the property when we first looked at it during an early weekend in May 1974. Snow was already on the ground when we moved there during November of 1974. We did not see bare ground again until months later in April of 1975.

That first winter we snowshoed a lot and learned about breaking trail in very deep snow.  I had a ball with my cross country skis on those beautiful trails. We only had a handful of cattle so there was time to enjoy the snow. We did buy a tractor mounted snowblower and it was to become an essential part of our lives.

Most mornings during the winter, I started the day by shoveling snow. It was not unusual for it to snow five or six inches during the night. The snowplows did not even bother with that tiny amount of snow. When it did not snow, there was usually snow sliding off the roof of the house. One way or the other you ended up shoveling for most of the winter. You learned that keeping up with the snow was a Canadian virtue that made life a lot easier in the snowy north.

You might guess that in a land as snowy as Tay Creek it would take some impressive storms to stand out in your memory. Getting a foot or so of snow really was no big deal in Tay Creek. However, getting two to three feet at one time sticks out in your memory even in place where the old timers swore that we had "eleven months of winter and one month of damn poor sledding."

One storm in April of 1975 delivered over three feet of heavy wet snow. Even with my heavy duty equipment it took me hours to clean the one quarter of mile of road to our first barn. Our cattle were wintered in the woods three quarters of a mile farther back. It was twenty four hours before I finally got back to feed them the next day.

The most impressive storm that hit us in the ten years we lived in Tay Creek came just on the heels of the coldest weather that we ever experienced. We complain here on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks when the temperature does not make it out of the forties. Cold in Canada is completely different. You know you are headed for a bad spell when today's low is tomorrow's high. It is especially bad when you start at something like minus ten degrees Fahrenheit and the temperature drops five to ten degrees each day for a week.

It was January 16, 1982 and we had finally bottomed out at minus 40 degrees. It was a time of extreme life threatening cold. The seats in our vehicles were like concrete because the moisture in the foam had frozen. When I rode out to feed the cattle using our tractor without a cab, the only uncovered part of me was my eyes. The moisture in your breath would freeze immediately on anything it touched even your own face mask.

Often when it got very cold, we would joke that it was going to have to warm up to snow. Usually at very cold temperatures, we had little wind and almost no precipitation except that any residual moisture in the air would freeze and fall to the ground as a strange instant snow as the temperatures got colder. January of 1982, was different.  We had extreme cold, wind, and lots of snow. This picture taken looking off our porch at the peak of the storm. It gives you an idea of how bad it was during that memorable storm.

It was a storm that will always be fresh in my mind since our youngest daughter was born just as it got started. Fortunately I made it the twenty miles to town in our big four wheel drive truck with my pregnant wife. We were also extremely lucky that she had a relatively quick delivery because my truck would never have started if it had been turned off in the extreme cold for more than a couple of hours.

As soon as I was sure that everything was okay at the hospital, I headed back home. It was so cold at home that we had hung blankets over all the windows the day before. My mother who was seventy-two at the time was keeping our other two children. I barely made it home and I can still remember the wonderful meal she had prepared. After twenty miles of driving in a blizzard, my mother's fried chicken was a treat. It was also a relief to be safely at home.

Schools hardly ever closed in Tay Creek. That next day they closed the schools because of the extreme cold.  Also some snowbanks were so tall that they were worried about children playing on them running into power lines. One section of  the road in Tay Creek near the village's store was actually so blocked by huge drifts that they sent the airport snowblower from Fredericton out to clear it so the regular plows could keep it open.

There have been other storms in my life, but the one in January of 1972 probably tops the list. When you get over two feet of snow and the temperature has been minus 40 with wind speeds of fifty to sixty miles per hour, it is hard to top. It took a long time to get cleaned up after that storm, but we survived.

While Canada and New Brunswick in particular are certainly places that can be called the home of real snow, I do remember one very impressive storm in the mountains of Virginia. We got over twenty inches of snow mixed with sleet. These pictures will give you an idea of what the snow looked like. I got pretty upset with VDOT for taking so long to clear a path up the mountain. They finally did send a road grader to clean our road. In Canada I had equipment that could clear roads, that was not the case in Virginia.

Today in 2013, I would rather be kayaking in the fog on our river than isolated by a snow storm. The funny thing is my wife does not understand my love of kayaking on the river in the fog any better than she did my love of snow storms in the seventies. However, she has learned to put up with the unusual things I enjoy.

The picture at the top of the post was taken in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in December, 2013, by good friends who live about a mile from our old farm.  I think they got another big storm the weekend of December 21, but I have not gotten pictures of it yet.

The Long Walk To The Barn

One of our Tay Creek barns

Many years ago in the seventies my wife and I were running a cattle farm located about twenty miles north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  We eventually had about two hundred head of cattle with around 65 calves being born each year.

The calves were typically born in February and March which as you might guess is a snowy time in the part of Canada where we lived.  For some reason, calves like to be born at night.  

Raising cattle is not the kind of thing you do with lots of help so during calving season I would make two to three trips a night to our calving area which was the woods around another barn a little farther away than the one in the picture.

The walk up the hill to the small field by the woods where the cattle were fenced was not a long one.  Even with the walk back to the house it was only about six tenths of a mile.  However, a good part of it went through the grove of tall spruce trees that separated our farm house from the barns.

Of course there were no street lights and you had to go no matter what the weather.  If I found a cow that had calved, I would walk the new calf to the barn between my legs and the new mother would follow.  I would put the calf and cow in a stall filled with nice clean straw.  Depending on the weather they would stay in the open front barn two to three days and then go back to join the herd.  The front part of the barn was arranged so that the calves could get under cover on dry straw during wet weather.  With the barn facing south it made a nice place for them on a sunny day.  Sometimes the straw looked like it was blanketed with calves.  I remember looking up there one time and my oldest daughter who had just started school was sitting there in the sunshine in the middle of a dozen sleeping Angus calves.

Walking through the dark woods in an almost wilderness area, never really bothered me.  I always figured that there was nothing in the woods that could harm me in the winter time.  All the bears and there were lots of them were hibernating.  The moose were deep in the swamps and the rest of the critters were more afraid of me than I was of them.

There is one thing almost certain about the northern woods.  When the temperature is down around minus twenty-eight Fahrenheit, there are no crazed muggers hiding in the three to four feet of snow in the spruce forest.  They would be frozen like a Popsicle pretty quick.

Walking in the dark in almost silence is a rather unique experience.  As someone who takes lots of pictures during daylight, it makes me use different senses. I have an opportunity to focus on my thoughts rather than where I am going to take my next picture.  There is no television, no computer, and no music.  While I usually have my smart-phone in my pocket, it never rings on my walks.  All it does is record the distance that I have walked.  I long ago took Facebook off my phone because all the status updates were too annoying.

If you have a safe place to walk at night, it is a great experience.  You have to let go of all your fears of the dark.   If you are not used to being alone in the dark outside, it is probably not a good idea to watch a bunch of crazy television vampire shows before you go on your walk unless television vampires have a hard time haunting you.

While things might wander through my mind, there are no vampires floating around in my head on my walks so that is not a problem of mine.  I hardly even watch the television news these days much less scary vampire stories.

I have been in places where even I decided to not walk in the dark.  I still remember one of my first nights in Washington, DC, during my career at Apple.  It was a nice June evening and I wanted to walk down to see the White House.  It was a short walk, but as I started out the door of the Hyatt Regency, the doorman stopped me.  He told me that I was the wrong color to be walking around in that DC neighborhood in the evening.  Being new to the DC area, I took his advice.  My neighbor in Columbia, Maryland, had just been carjacked in his Volvo the previous week.

We now live on North Carolina's Crystal Coast, a long way from our old farm in New Brunswick.  Coastal North Carolina and Carteret County where we live is a remarkable, almost wild place.  We have the Croatan National Forest of 158,000 acres cradling our back.  To the north and east of us is the 56 miles of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.  To the south is the Atlantic Ocean and to the west on the other side of our two mile wide river, the White Oak, are the thousands of wild acres of Camp Lejeune.

While we live in a subdivision with just over forty homes, my walks at night are in a section that only has one occupied home in it.  The distance to the end of the road there is almost exactly the distance that I used to walk to the barn in Tay Creek.  Maybe that is why I feel so comfortable. In 2013, the biggest difference is that I have the benefit of a couple of street lights.  Also the road is paved and the temperature might get to twenty eight Fahrenheit only a couple of times a year. It never gets to minus twenty-eight.

As I was walking the other night, the fog was rolling in off the river and the moon kept sliding behind the clouds.  Someone had turned on almost all the lights in the one home along my path, but I could tell no one was home.  The home looked a little spooky with the fog swirling around the blazing lights which seemed to be trying to ward off the fog.  I could hear our local owl hooting in the distance.  When I made the turn to head back home, a great blue heron squawked at me for disturbing his nap.

The walks I take these days in the dark do not bother me any more that the ones I took over thirty years ago.  While I am a lot older and slower, our bears are over in the national forest.  I have only seen one alligator passing through out waters in seven years and I never seen or heard any big coyotes around so I feel pretty safe.

I would rather be walking in the dark streets through the pine forests along the White Oak River than almost any street in any town in the world.  It might look a little spooky in the fog, but even the fog is a pretty rare event.  The warmth of the marsh often comforts me and prepares me for a good night's rest.

I cannot think of any place I would rather be even in the dark.

 

My Wife's First Nova Scotia Snow

We were married in the heat of a North Carolina August day in 1973. 

I had been living in the old farmhouse overlooking the Bay of Fundy for nearly two years when we got married that summer. 

When I bought the farmhouse, barn, and 140 acres in the late spring of 1971, the house was pink. A lot of work had gone into making it sort of livable.

By the time we got back from North Carolina after a summer of getting ourselves and friends married, the huge garden was so weedy that I had to mow between the rows before I could till them.  Learning how to garden, preserve food, and make hay was all part of the experience of living in Nova Scotia that still makes me fondly remember those first few years right after college.

We lived in the little village of Saint Croix Cove between the small harbor towns of Hampton and Port Lorne.  It was a long ride into Bridgetown for any groceries or supplies.  Bridgetown did not even have a supermarket in those days. At the time the road along the shore was dirt.  My first two winters there I had been amazed at how we could get a storm that would start out as snow, change to rain, and back to snow.  The road would go from frozen solid with snow drifts to mud to frozen ruts dusted with snow all in twenty-four hours.

September is one of the special months in the Maritimes. People are cleaning up their gardens and getting ready for the winter. We were working away at the remnants of the garden while my new wife battled homesickness as all her friends were over 1,200 miles away.  Our old farmhouse with hand-hewn beams was a work in process and very different from the modern apartment in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she lived before I convinced her to come to Nova Scotia.

Fortunately, we had added a brick chimney and a stone fireplace the first winter because in September of 1973 a surprise snow storm hit us.  We got almost a foot of heavy wet snow.  Not only did it take the power out, but it also blocked our link with the town, the shore road.  Luckily, we had enough wood cut to keep warm. We also had some kerosene lamps for light.  We managed to cook what we needed over the fire in our fireplace.

Joe, one of our neighbors who had made his living herding sheep, figured out that he could take the bar off his chainsaw and use it run our belt driven pumps so we could have some water.   My wife remembers sitting by the fire and finishing an afghan that she had started at some time during college.

It was a tough introduction to Nova Scotia for my wife, but we are still married over forty years later.  I remember the power being out for several days.  What made us the happiest was the snow plow finally clearing the road.  For anyone who has never lived in an isolated settlement, it is hard to properly describe how excited you can get with the big road grader with a mounted V-plow comes roaring through the night with lights flashing and snow swirling around it. It looks like an alien spaceship, but it is certainly a welcome sight after a big storm.

There were several more snow storms the first winter for my wife.  She got see some of the more traditional Nova Scotia snow that often blows from one shore of the province to other as the wind changes.  Our old house was very hard to heat and she still complains about having to plan her showers for days when the wind was not blowing so she would not freeze.

I still remember nearly freezing my cheeks cross-country skiing down the big field behind our farmhouse.  Those Nova Scotia times still linger with us.  The beautiful blue waters of North Carolina's Crystal Coast and the rural nature of Carteret County with its surrounding Croatan National Forest, Bogue Sound, and Cape Lookout National Seashore are good reminders.

You can read more about how we got to Nova Scotia and a recent trip back in our book, A Taste for the Wild - Canada's Maritimes.  The cover picture is my wife with Tok, one our Labrador Retrievers, in the big hay field behind the house overlooking the Bay Fundy.

 

Memories Of Canadian Waters

Waters Just Outside Bogue Inlet, August 28, 2013

Something about the water that we found just outside of Bogue Inlet on August 28, 2013, reminded me of Canada. 

I do not remember ever seeing any waters in Canada that looked like these Crystal Coast waters,

The waters along the shores of Atlantic Canada often looked like the rough waters just outside of Bogue Inlet that we saw in late summer of 2013.  These waters beat us up enough that we stayed less than hour before looking for a calmer place to fish.

Of course waters often change from day to day, a couple of weeks prior to taking that shot I snapped this picture.  The photo that I took on August 19 shows even a more dramatic difference. With the water being very calm we were able to enjoy our time out there a lot more than the day when the whipped up waters attacked us from all sides. 

Perhaps my memory is not serving me well, but I remember very few times when the Bay of Fundy near our place in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia, was ever calm.  Low tide seemed to be the only time when the water was almost at peace with itself.

Of course having a tide of twenty-eight feet might have something to do with those stirred up waters.  There are other events that help me remember rough Canadian waters.  I made several trips on the Bluenose Ferry that used to travel the waters between Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and Bar Harbor, Maine. 

As I recount in my book, A Taste For The Wild, Canada's Martimes, I can remember napping on one of  the Bluenose's long sofas and seeing some of the heavy weighted ash trays slide by as we rocked and rolled in the water.  Of course that was nothing like the trips by ferry to Newfoundland where they chained down each corner of your vehicle. 

My last crossing to Prince Edward Island before they built the causeway was during a fierce winter storm that had waves breaking over the bow of the icebreaker that was hauling us to the island.  The water was freezing as soon as it hit the steel hull.

The few years we lived high on a hill near Mount Saint Vincent University overlooking Halifax Harbor gave us a calmer view of the water.  Still as is often the case, you remember those stormy days long after you might remember a normal day.

All of us that live near the water know that it can change quickly.  Often a storm like Hurricane Irene can whip up even the waters of a calm little inlet like ours. We live just off the White Oak River not far from Swansboro, North Carolina, and we are pretty well protected.  Of course during a hurricane the waves over at the ocean are pretty wild, but we often have a hard time seeing them since the big bridge to the barrier island is closed during storms.  These pictures of some surfers during one of our storms are a good reminder of how stirred up our water can get.

Living by or near to the water is a great privilege, but it does come with some challenges as you can see from these Irene pictures.  Being close to the water seems to magnify weather, but on the other hand we can get some great sunset pictures on the water. I also would not be able to enjoy fishing ten months out of the year if I did not live on the water here on the Southern Outer Banks.

The rough waters outside Bogue Inlet on one day will not keep us from going back there.  I will enjoy the Canadian memories that they trigger and keep going back until we get to enjoy another one of those days when the water is bathtub calm.

There is one big difference in our waters from the Canadian waters that I remember and that happens to be temperature.  The day we saw the rough waters we also recorded a water temperature in the ocean of seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit which is much higher than I ever remember seeing water in Canada.  You can read more about that in this post.

If you want to plan a trip to sample some of our warm waters, check out our Emerald Isle Travel Guide.  It is available either in Kindle format or paperback.  Our waters also have some nice fish and people have been known to catch drum fever from fishing here.

Beach Days In Canada

Beach Near Emerald Isle, North Carolina, Town Line

Nova Scotia must be reeling from all the heat.  During the first eighteen days of July 2013 Halifax has endured seven days with temperatures in the eighties and another two days when the temperatures reached ninety or better.  There were only two days with high temperatures in the sixties.

As any Haligonian will tell you that is actually pretty warm for Halifax which usually has a July average high temperature in the low seventies Fahrenheit or twenty-three Celsius.  We lived in Halifax for a couple of years in the eighties.  I can remember a down jacket feeling good at a few evening soccer games.  I can only remember one session of hot weather and it only lasted for two or three days.  That was a good thing since we had no air conditioning in our house or cars for that matter.

Even with all the hot weather, the current water temperature on July 19 in Halifax Harbor is a chilly 62F. We went to the beach a few times in the Halifax area, but mostly when we wanted some beach time we headed off to Prince Edward Island.  It used to be one of my favorite places on earth. I have not been there in twenty-seven years, but I doubt that it has lost its charm.  We hoped to make it there when we were on our trip in the fall of 2012.  That visit back to New Brunswick sparked my book, A Taste of the Wild, Canada's Maritimes. Unfortunately Hurricane Sandy had other plans and chased us back down the coast.

I spent a fair amount of time in Prince Edward Island during my time at Datamaster and when I was Apple representative in the Atlantic Provinces.  We also vacationed there.  I still remember our first vacation on the Island.  We were fresh from ten years of working on the farm.  We really did not even know how to vacation.

The first night that we walked on the beach it was so windy that it sandblasted our ankles.  Still the north shore of Prince Edward Island is a gorgeous place and we ended up having a great time.  We did take to heart the province's advertising that PEI has "the warmest beaches north of the Carolinas."  We went looking for some warmer water after our kids turned blue in the surf on the north shore of Prince Edward Island.  We were able to stick our toes in the water on the other side of the Island but water barely getting into the seventies is nothing to native North Carolinans.  We usually have water like that in May and sometimes even in late March.

I recently spent a wonderful morning fishing over at the area called The Point  in the town of Emerald Isle which is located on the piece of the Southern Outer Banks called Bogue Banks.  We are an extension of the same Outer Banks that is the home to Nags Head, Kitty Hawk, Duck, Corolla, and Hatteras.  This a map of the area for those unfamiliar with what is often called the Crystal Coast.  The water temperature here in the Point area was somewhere between 82F and 84F.That is consistent with the maps that I have found.  The water actually had cooled some from earlier in the week.

With those temperatures in mind I did some fact checking of sea surface temperatures.  It does not look good for Prince Edward Island's claim. I suspect the waters off of Prince Edward Island should not even be mentioned in the same sentence as the ocean waters of North Carolina when it comes to temperature.  Both places have great scenic beauty and wonderful people, but there is a lot of warmer water north of North Carolina. On July 20, 2013 our waters are in the low to mid-eighties.  Other than the statement on the province's tourism site,  I cannot find anything which shows that the waters of Prince Edward Island are much different than those in Halifax Harbour.

I offer up this sea surface temperature map of Atlantic Canada and this one of United States Northeast Coast and finally another one of the Southeast Coast as proof that there is lots of warmer water than that of Prince Edward Island north of North Carolina.

Prince Edward Island has enough wonderful things going for it without trying to lure people to its beaches with questionable advertising.  I am not a big fan of tourism sites which are often funded by businesses who want visitors to think everything is perfect in paradise.  Just Prince Edward Island lobsters are enough to get me to want to visit.

While I do think we live in a little piece of paradise here on the North Carolina coast, tourists if they listen only to tourist bureau hype sometimes get taken advantage of when they visit.  In spite of all the sunny photos, we do get some rain.  We also have some restaurants that charge exhorbitant prices for mediocre meals like this fried flounder and clam strip dinner that set me back $20 US.  We had not been to this particular restaurant for a few years and had come looking for whole fried clams which someone who worked there had told us was a regular item on the menu.  They did not have them when we got there and we made the unwise decision to not drive back to the restaurants where we know what we are going to get.

Actually it is better that a bad meal happen to us than to some tourists.  My wife and I write a travel guide for the Emerald Isle area.  In the book there is a link to a restaurant list that we keep updated year round.  You can be certain the restaurant where I ate the clam strips will not make it on our recommended list.

There is plenty of good food in our area and our $4.99 book offers plenty of recommendations which I should have taken to heart myself. I would love to see more Nova Scotians, Prince Edward Islanders, New Brunswickers come visit us.  We do have nice warm waters, but we are not the beach for everyone.

There is lots of space on the beach here much like on Prince Edward Island and Islanders would be comfortable with all our fields.  Our fields are corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton instead of potatoes,  but we also have plenty of vegetables grown in the area.  Our strawberries are usually ripe by the middle of April and the tomatoes come in around the first week in June.  Our eating corn is usually ready before July 1 and our watermelons are ripe by the first week of July.

So the next time you want some really warm waters, some visit North Carolina's Secret To Share, Carteret County.  If we do not have enough warmth for you, there are even warmer beaches south of here, but I do think you will be very comfortable here on the Crystal Coast.

The Land of Real Snow

 

The east coast has just been through one of its periodic winter storms.  If you live along North Carolina's coast, you eventually learn that many of these storms get re-energized in our waters before they make their trek up the coast.

I often wonder how we survived all the years we lived on the farm without the Weather Channel.  We obviously had some weather forecasts, but I think they were pretty basic.  Mostly we waited to see what the weather would deliver and sometimes it brought a really severe storm.  When you live on a farm, you take what the weather brings and do your best to get what needs to be done finished in a timely fashion.

Many people are surprised to learn that Canada actually has snow belts.  Those places where the snow seems to be present for an inordinately large part of the year a rare in North Carolina, but not in New Brunswick.   After three years in Nova Scotia which tends more to rain, snow, rain and back to snow, we moved to Tay Creek, New Brunswick about twenty miles north of Fredericton.  Tay Creek was just far enough north and higher in altitude than Fredericton to be one of those snow belts.  The picture in the post shows one of the barns that I built in what could be considered an average winter snow in Tay Creek.

Our first year there I kept track of the snow.  We got around twenty-three feet of snow that year.  It was not the snowiest year that we saw but it was in the top few.  There were no closing schools for snow but they did close a couple of times when the temperatures got down to minus 40.

The March 6, 2013 storm that brushed Washington, DC, brought mostly what the Weather Channel folks are fond of calling "heart attack" snow which is heavy and wet. The picture that I got of the Northern Virginia storm was impressive but it just did not look like Canadian snow which rarely melts when it first hits the roads unless it falls in late April or early May.  In Canada, we worried most about heavy and wet snows collapsing roofs on homes and buildings.

I will admit to enjoying snowstorms from the comfort of our coastal home.  I have been a weather junkie for a long time but I have also shoveled more than my fair share of snow over the years.  One of the toughest storms that I remember was actually one that caught us at our home in the Virginia mountains on December 19, 2009.  The snow was deep and mixed with some sleet.  These pictures will give you an idea of how difficult it was to clear.  It would have been good snow for making igloos.

When I first moved to Canada after graduating from college, snow was an exciting challenge.  I was born in North Carolina and a good blizzard was something of a thrill.  We had the equipment to handle it on the farm so while it was a challenge, it was one we knew how to handle.

There is something cozy about being snowed in if you have heat, water, and don't have to carve a mile-long road out to your cattle so they can be fed.

My wife keeps trying to reconcile the beach and water-loving version of me with that 1974 version which loved the challenge of snow.  Some things just will never be adequately explained.

Still I have made an effort at explaining how someone who graduated from Harvard after studying history ended up building a big cattle operation in New Brunswick far from the warm salt water of North Carolina.

Our new book, "A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes," has just been published on Amazon's Kindle store.  It is good study in how snow and more likely farming can build character in someone whose family never strayed very far from the soil.  It is also a deal at only $2.99.  If you have never tried an e-book, this is a good one to try.  It is not tremendously long and has 59 images to break up the text.

The book can be read on just about any electronic device using free Kindle software or software for your browser.  Links to the software and the book can be found here at this site.

Back to the Trees of the North

 

Looking South at The Tay Valley, October 2012

This has been a year of changes.  Our home in Roanoke, Virginia finally sold after two years on the market.  Saying goodbye to Roanoke was tough, but it was time.  We lived there even longer than the sixteen years that we lived in Canada.

With the challenge of taking care of two houses gone, we could plan a trip back to New Brunswick.  The trip has been at the top of my agenda for a few years, but it always seemed like we were too busy.

We managed to get on road October 19, and drove to the Northern Virginia area where two of our grown children live.  We spent the night with them and visited the next morning until just before noon.  We managed to make it north of Baltimore before stopping for a lunch at diner that turned out to be a disappointment because of mediocre food and slow service. Lunch taking over an hour put us in line for some serious traffic.

That day which was a Friday, we did great until we got across Tappan Zee Bridge.  Just forty-five miles from our planned destination in Connecticut, we ended up in stop and go traffic.  It took us nearly two hours to go those last forty-five miles to Danbury. Then when we got off the Interstate, we couldn't find our hotel.  I finally called from the parking lot of a local Target.  We were only one quarter of a mile from the the hotel, but their maintenance man had forgotten to turn on their external lights so they were practically invisible.

Fortunately there was an Outback attached to the hotel so we didn't have to get in the car again for dinner.  That next day we drove from Danbury, Connecticut, to Bangor, Maine.  We managed to get on the road early and avoid any slow diners so we could reach our destination at a reasonable hour.

I wanted to arrive early so I could enjoy a couple of lobsters for dinner.  We asked the folks at the front desk for the best spot for lobsters and headed out for Captain Nick's.  The two lobsters that they brought me were delicious.  Having lobsters for dinner made up for eating lunch at a Subway in Littleton, Massachusetts.

Our fourth day on the road, Sunday, October 21, we headed off for Houlton, Maine, where we had lunch at a McDonald's before attempting the border crossing.  You never know what kind of mood you will find at a border spot.  We didn't slide through like we have so many times.  We were asked to go inside and wait for an immigration agent.  It being Sunday, there was only one on duty so we waited over forty-five minutes.  I was beginning to get a little worried until I figured out that the agent was busy processing a family that was actually trying to immigrate.

When we finally got to talk to him, it started off slow, but as soon as we mentioned that we had lived in Canada for sixteen years and farmed in New Brunswick for over ten years, he immediately waved us on through.  It only took about forty-minutes after crossing the border to wander up to Carleton County and find the beautiful home of our friends George and Alberta.

We were quickly welcomed and quickly taken inside in case our thin Southern blood started to freeze.  Fortunately it actually wasn't very cold and the grass was still very green.  In fact it was greener than our centipede grass down at the beach.  Before going inside we met another guest, Bear, a wonderful dog staying a few days while his companion was away.  We were treated like special guests, and we didn't hear a single political advertisement while staying there.  There was no worry about getting cold since George and Alberta heat with wood.

I had forgotten how much of a treat it is to be in country.  The next day I got a great tour of the countryside and visited with an old friend from our cattle days.  I was struck by the beauty of the area and how clean and pure the air smelled.  It was just a wonderful experience with some great friends.

After two nights in Carleton County we headed off to visit some friends who just lived down the road from where we used to farm.  Kerry and Brenda quickly made us feel at home in their lovely remodeled farmhouse, and the next day I got another tour. This time I got to drive through our old farm.  While it was nice to see the old farm.  Some of the changes were tough to take, but once you don't own a piece of property, you have to let it go.  It was much colder that first morning in Tay Creek with the temperature dropping to 20F, but again the wood heat kept us from even noticing.

Kerry was kind enough to take me to the Fredericton area.  It seems to have prospered since we left.  I have a feeling that it would be a great place to live.  Kerry also took me to see his maple sugar operation and we even came home with some delicious homemade maple syrup.  I would love to visit again when the snow is on the ground and the sap is running.

After a couple of nights in Tay Creek, we noticed that Hurricane Sandy was making its presence known off the coast of North Carolina.  We made a wise decision to head back before Sandy managed to make landfall in New Jersey.  Our border crossing back into the states lasted about forty-five seconds.

We had planned to drive back by way of the Jersey shore, but you don't win any agruments with hurricanes. Our quick trip home allowed us to slide down the coast before Sandy got serious.  I'll be writing a short book about our Canadian experience.

It was nice to get home after driving 2,800 miles.  The weather hasn't been perfect this year, but it looks like the worst might be past us.  As this Nor'easter is disappearing, things are starting to look better.  At least a little blue sky has finally shown up.

The Point Beyond the Yellow House

Beyond the Yellow House at the Point

I lived in Canada for sixteen years.  I moved to Canada because I fell in love with its beauty, wildness, and the feeling that I had gone back an era.

Those days were some of the most memorable times in my life.  I made great friends and loved living in the north country except on particularly American holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. 

Eventually all the snow, the cold, and distance from home began to wear on me, but still our time in Canada was a magical one.

That I went to Canada in search of wildness is a tribute to youth and not fully appreciating what was right on my doorstep.  Having grown up in North Carolina, I was no stranger to the state's beaches. 

I even have a cherished photograph of me on the Point at Emerald Isle in the late sixties.  Little did I know then that over forty years later I would rediscover a treasured place and find all the wildness that I need just a few miles from my current home on the White Oak River.

A few years before we moved back to the United States, we came back home to North Carolina and took the kids for a beach vacation.  On our drive from Mount Airy, NC to the Northern Outer Banks, we stopped for lunch in Tarboro, NC.  It was so hot when we got out of the car that the asphalt in the parking lot was sticky.

Glenda, my wife, casually said to me as we were walking to the restaurant that she was warm all the way to her core.  I got a chuckle out of it then and when she said it later on a trip to Kure Beach with her parents.  Today it makes me reflect on how different life by the water is in North Carolina and Canada.

During our Canadian years we had three homes, our two Nova Scotia homes were both in the sight of the water.  We had brooks coming out of every hollow on Tay Creek farm.  I used to love to pitch my blue mountain tent down by the shore of the Bay of Fundy.  I can still remember the salty taste of a steak grilled over driftwood.

In Canada we lived by the water, here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast, we live on or in the water.  It is a fundamental difference.  I still remember being surprised that my young Labrador retriever puppies loved taking a dip in the Bay of Fundy even when the water temperatures were in the forties.  Unfortunately even in the summer the water rarely got to sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

If you spend much time on the water in a small boat, you quickly learn that your air temperature is pretty much whatever the water temperature happens to be.  In the winter when I take a ride down the White Oak River on a seventy degree day, I still have to bundle up if the water temperature is below sixty.

Conversely in the fall when the air is cool and the water is still warm, it is a real treat to be on the water and enjoy its warmth.  While the water in Canada is beautiful to behold, the water here on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks invites you to get wet.

July of 2012 has proven to be stubbornly warm along the most of the east coast of the United States.  North Carolina is certainly no exception.  Even along the coast it has been very warm.  At our home just three miles up the White Oak River from the Intracoastal Waterway, we have seen plenty of temperatures in the low to mid-nineties.

It is the South, and we do expect warm temperatures in July and August.  We are seeing them, and they have warmed the area waters.  I watched the area fireworks from our skiff on the evening of July 4th.  My GPS/depth finder showed that our water temperature in the river at 9 PM was over 86F.  The surf over at the beaches in the low eighties.

Surprisingly eighty plus degrees out on the water at night in a stiff breeze is pretty comfortable.  In fact it is a lot more comfortable than sixty degrees in the wind.

When it does get hot here on the coast, we head for the water.  On July six just before noon when the temperature was around ninety, I went kayaking.  There was a great breeze out on the water.  With my kayak parked in the marsh grass I could have stayed there for hours if other things weren't calling me.

On July 5, I left for a beach hike around 4 PM.  It was close to ninety when I left home.  When I arrived at the beach the temperature was 86F.  There was also a good ocean breeze.  My hike of 4.5 miles in those conditions left me wishing that I had more daylight left so I could hike even further.  That day I took these pictures.

If you view the album you will see a surprising lack of people (short YouTube video panorama) for a popular beach on the day after July 4th.  This time of the year once you get out beyond the yellow house that marks the last line of homes along Inlet Drive and Bogue Court, you will find lots of sand but few people.

There is plenty of beach for people to spread out on closer to the beach access points.  The beach beyond the yellow house is almost like a park.  It is waiting for those of us willing to walk a little.

Not surprisingly to those of us who live here on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks, much of the area we call the Crystal Coast has special places like the Point or nearby Hammocks Beach where you can find all the solitude that you want. 

It is amazing that we can have all the modern conveniences of the world, almost no traffic, and scenic beauty rivaled only by a few places in the world in our coastal paradise.

From my days in Canada, I remember how Canadians used to flock to Old Orchard Beach in Maine or the beautiful shores of Prince Edward Island.  They are wonderful places, but they aren't places where the water invites you to get wet from May through November most years.

If this makes any Canadians or even land bound Americans yearn for a trip to our area, consider buying my book, "A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide."  You won't regret visiting this area where you can explore the unknown without going very far.