Chester NS Canada

We left Lunenburg at 1120hrs on 6 August for a short 20 miles sail up the coast towards Halifax.  After our bright sunny days at Lunenburg, Sunday was really rather dull and grey.  But despite the colder looking weather we have found that since we left Carter’s Bay 3 days ago, we are no longer having any condensation problems because the sea temperature has doubled and is up around 20 degrees Celcius.  It seems that this bit of Nova Scotia is warmed by the Gulf Stream.

Approaching Chester.  The main harbour (top right) and the back harbour where we anchored (bottom)

The grey weather continued for the whole of our passage.  We met a couple of fog patches (happily they didn’t last long) and it even started to rain as we approached Chester.  Chester sits on a headland with the main harbour on the eastern side and the Back Harbour on the western side.  Our pilot book suggested that the holding and the protection (sheltered by a number of islands) was better in the back harbour and so that is where we decided to head for.

The Chester Yacht Club

It was still grey but at least the rain had stopped when we dropped our anchor, just clear of the mooring buoys, at 1400hrs and took in our surroundings.  We were in a very sheltered bay surrounded by expensive looking summer residences.  Our pilot book quipped that “Chester was founded in 1759 by families from New England and that a small fort with 20 cannon was built as defence against the marauding Yankees; the cannon may have kept the Yankees out then but in the last century they have returned in the guise of ‘Summer People’.  The population is still largely Canadian but it swells with summer residents from as far afield as New York and Baltimore.”  We went ashore to see what the attraction was.

Schooner race week based at the Rope Loft restaurant

In the 3^rdweek of August the town hosts the annual Chester Race Week and the week that we visited there was schooner racing scheduled.  We wandered around the town and the harbour spotting the gathering schooners at the Rope Loft restaurant.

Views across to the outlying islands (L) and the back harbour (R)

The houses were all very nice but there was little in the way of a heart to the town though, with a small row of shops and restaurants on the road behind the yacht club, the village has more of a centre than many others we have visited.

Back on board BV

Having walked around the main harbour and up the river from it we returned to the dinghy and took a short ride in it up to the top of the Back Harbour.  Again it we found it all very attractive in a wealthy, well-manicured sort of way.  The waterside is lined with docks and boathouses (mostly large and very large) all associated with generally splendid-looking houses, primarily, we think, summer residences.  But at the very back of Back Harbour a moment of normality exists; a couple of small, slightly scruffy boatyards with floating pontoons and a plethora of small motor boats.  The next inlet along took us back into summer residence territory, where the houses just got larger and much more spread out.  We returned to BV and the weather took a definite turn for the better.  With warm sunshine and clear blue skies we were back in shorts and T-shirts for a very pleasant evening just watching the comings and goings in the small harbour….

… and the sun setting over the anchorage.

The following morning was fabulously still.  The forecast was for the wind to build a little later on but we wanted to move on in order to reach Halifax mid-afternoon.  So, by 0800, the anchor was up [Ed:  with Reg blessing the new deck wash again as the seabed proved to be really icky mud] and we were headed northeast for the capital of the Nova Scotia and the Atlantic Maritimes.

Chester, NS, Canada