Liscomb Lodge Cove NS Canada

Wednesday morning ‘views’ of Horse’s Head Harbour

We woke on Wednesday 15 August to another foggy outlook, which failed to clear over breakfast as it had the previous day.  So we set off anyway.  As we raised the anchor, the fog briefly lifted to give about a mile’s visibility but by the time we were following the channel down Beaver Harbour towards the open sea it had clamped back down.  Radar on, foghorn blaring, we motored onwards into the dampness.

Sailing along in 12knot fog

After an hour we had enough wind to sail, which massively improved our outlook on the passage, even if we still had the foghorn blaring and still needed to keep a close eye on the radar screen. From what we didn’t see from the deck but could see on the radar, we had no more than 0.3nm visibility for the whole passage, right up until we were inside the Liscomb River.  For much of the passage we had no more than 100m visibility.

Motoring up the Liscomb River

Once we were a good distance inside the river, the visibility picked up (the land and river waters are warmer than the sea) and we could enjoy the misty views as we motored upriver.  The river starts off quite wide and deep, save for a few areas of shallows off headlands.  But further up it becomes narrower and there are a few places, winding in and out between islands and the mainland shore, where it gets very shallow (or so the chart says) so we took it very carefully, just in case it all became just a little bit too shallow.

Moored on the pontoon at Liscomb Lodge

Happily, the pilot book was right and had sufficient depth to make it all the way into the final reach, even though, yet again, we were arriving at low tide!  Up at Liscomb Lodge, Chester, the Lodge’s boatman, gave us a fantastic welcome.  He had been out with clients in the tripper boat (bottom right of picture above) and had seen us motoring up the river and so was ready to take our lines and to tell us all about the Lodge.  As Lodge clients (since we stayed on the pontoon for the night) we were entitled to use the swimming pool, fitness suite, sauna and jacuzzi as well as the kayaks, canoes and mountain bikes!  And, there were the more mundane services – water, garbage disposal, wifi……and diesel! We certainly didn’t expect the latter. Finally, the Lodge has a well-renown restaurant, though we had more than enough food on board.  Chester gave us a full run down on the area, including other good anchorages and told us that there was plenty of water to anchor outside the channel in the final reach up to the lodge – he estimated that the German yacht in the picture above was anchored in about 30ft.

In the end, we made little use of most of Liscomb Lodge’s many facilities but we did manage to tick off a lot of admin tasks in another very tranquil spot.

Liscomb Lodge Cove, NS, Canada