Horse’s Head Harbour NS Canada

The morning of Tuesday 14 August dawned still, foggy and chilly….

….but as the sun rose the fog burned off and everything warmed up considerably, though the day remained glassy calm.

At 1015 we headed out to continue our journey northeast up the coast.  Yet again it looked as if most of the day would be spent under engine and that turned out to be the case.

Sheet Harbour

We planned to overnight at a small cove called Horse’s Head Harbour but en route we ‘popped’ into Sheet Harbour to see if we could get a connection to the internet as we had a few emails that we needed to deal with in reasonably short order.  ‘Popped’ because the detour into Sheet Harbour from seaward is about 6nm, an hour’s motoring, from the entrance buoy up the river to the town.  Had we been able to get a Roger’s Wireless phone signal on our USVI AT&T phone, then we would have been able to use some of our monthly data allocation to do the internet thing.  However, this bit of the coast, whilst quite well-endowed with comms masts, sadly does not have Roger’s Wireless coverage.  So, we motored up to Sheet Harbour and, much to our delight, were able to hook up to a very weak, free wifi signal from the town’s tourist office, allowing us to do what we needed (albeit very slowly) without pumping up the dinghy and rowing ashore. From our vantage point in the anchorage we could see that, as well as the tourist office, the town boasts a good-sized supermarket and an NSLC store, so we’ve noted it in the pilot book as a potential provisioning stop for the route back down the coast.

Seals: (top) lazing, (bottom left) swimming and (bottom right) doing yoga!

The benefit of another day of virtually no wind is that we got to take BV through some rocky passages and close enough to more seal haulouts to be able to get a reasonable view, and some pictures, of the animals,

Mind you, the camera seems to scare off the seals in much the same way that it does dolphins!

Approaching Horse’s Head Harbour. (Top) the point in the midground on the left of the picture, Beaver Point, has shallows extending some way off, marked by a couple of small green lateral buoys.  (Bottom) the entrance channel into the cove is narrow and relatively shallow

Horse’s Head Harbour is named as such because it looks a bit like an upside down horse’s head when viewed on the chart.  We gave Beaver Point a good offing to avoid shallows off its tip and lined up carefully for the entrance to the harbour itself, which the pilot book warns has depths of 8-10 ft.  We arrived at low tide, so the narrow entrance was even narrower that it might otherwise have been but at least we knew that if we touched the bottom we wouldn’t be stuck there for long!  As it turned out, the pilot book is a little pessimistic and we didn’t see less than 3.6m on a 0.3m rise of tide, which equates to a sounding of just under 11ft. Mostly the entrance was much deeper.

Anchored inside Horse’s Head Harbour

Once inside and without an idea of the depth contours and/or silting in the cove we went for what seemed to be a safe ‘anchor in the middle’ option.  And it was quite safe if, potentially, a little anti-social if any other yachts had turned up.  But we thought the odds on that were quite long, and we were right there too. Horse’s Head Harbour is written up in our pilot book as ‘one of the prettiest on the coast’.  In our view that somewhat overstates the place.  We thought it quite attractive but there are a number of unremarkable houses around the edge of the cove as well as docks in various states of repair and kit and equipment near the water’s edge.  Nothing unreasonable but no longer deserving of the pilot book’s accolade – times change.  But we had a peaceful night in the anchorage (once the crying child in one of the houses was put to bed) and we were certainly in a very protected and snug location had the weather turned foul which, happily, it didn’t.

Horse’s Head Harbour, NS, Canada