We’re up and out early as we are headed to the Digby Neck for a whale watch trip on the Bay of Fundy. From the campsite to the dock, about an hour drive, it’s pea soup fog. Before venturing out on the whale watch we enjoy a breakfast at the café where the whale watch starts. There are three different whale watching companies sailing from Digby Neck. We are on the one where you don’t need to take a ferry. The Digby Neck is a very long finger of land that includes two long islands. To arrive at the end of the Neck requires two ferry rides. Our boat takes off from the very first ferry dock thus avoiding the ferries. The ferry pulls away from the dock and two minutes later we board the boat from the place vacated by the ferry.
As we head out from the protected harbor, okay harbour, the fog does not abate. Spotting whales in this weather will be a challenge. Shortly after arriving in open water we spot an Ocean Sunfish or Mola Mola. These creatures weight up to 5,000 pounds and are huge. They are a boney fish that feeds on jellyfish and other small ocean critters. Locating whales in this thick soup is a challenge. All three whaling cruises head to the same general location and communicate with each other once whales are found. It’s hard to see any distance so it’s almost impossible to locate them that way. What they do is stop the boat and turn off the engines. Then it’s time to listen. They are listening for the sound the blowhole makes when the whale surfaces. Even hearing this sound in these windy conditions is tough. The process repeats several times with no luck. It’s time to turn around and head back to port when one of the other whale watching boats locates some humpbacks near our first listening spot while heading out. We return to there and have some up close views of three humpback whales, a mom, a calf, and an escort. This continues for roughly 20 minutes before we head back to the dock.
After grabbing a quick seafood lunch we head to the adorable small community of Bear River. Jeanne stumbled across a short write up on this artisan community so we were game. The road to this community was a rural country road, yet it was straight as an arrow with very uninteresting residences along the way. Wells remarked that what we were seeing at the moment was anything but interesting. The road was straight as an arrow over rolling hills. We came around the first bend in the road in maybe four miles when the character of everything changes as we come into the town. It’s on the Bear River and ships would travel up this narrow river from the Bay of Fundy as the tide rose and brought them to the community where there there’s a large area to turn around. They would dock at the shipping office building and unload and load cargo. When they were done they would return to the Bay of Fundy on an outgoing tide.
That shipping office building is now a two story art gallery where we made a few purchases and found out more about the town’s history. There’s another art gallery down the street which we also enjoyed. Once finished exploring we continued past the town center to a lovely small winery. Once done there we picked our way back home via smaller rural roads.
Seeing North America 