Little Harbour Bras d’Or Lake NS Canada

Leaving Baddeck

So, after a very pleasant couple of nights at Baddeck in the middle of the morning of Saturday 25 August we raised the anchor and headed off back towards St Peter’s Canal.

Alexander Graham Bell’s Home

There was little wind and we planned to stop for lunch en-route to our planned overnight anchorage, so the engine got a bit of a workout.  First on the list of ‘places to spot’ was the house overlooking Braddeck where Alexander Graham Bell had lived and worked at end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Maskell’s Bay, where the Cruising Club of America was formed

Our lunchstop was at Maskell’s Bay, which is where the Cruising Club of America was formed.  It’s an attractive spot with good holding in gunky mud and great shelter behind the point near the entrance.  We tucked in here not for the shelter but to give the other sailing yacht and 3 motor boats already in the bay plenty of space.  Just before we left 2 more motor boats and 3 more sailing yachts arrived.  The place was getting busy – clearly a weekend!  One of the new arrivals was an Ovni called Pelerin, sailed by Colin and Lou.  They’re members of the OCC (they were flying their burgee) so as we departed we motored over to say hello and ended up hearing a little about their adventures in Newfoundland, from where they had just returned.  We hope that we might end up in the same anchorage overnight at some point so that we can pick their brains about the sailing further north.

Approaching the Barra Strait Bridge

By this time there was a good sailing wind and we had a brisk beat south to the Barra Strait Bridge.  We approached from a wide angle and wondered if we had managed to creep up on the bridge-keeper but when Nicky called on the radio with ¾nm to go he replied that ‘our’ bridge lift was already in progress. Damn, he’d spotted us!

Once through the bridge we set off sailing again but the wind dropped after about an hour so we resorted to the iron topsail to make sure that we got to Little Harbour in reasonable time.

The entrance to Little Harbour

The entrance to the bay is narrow, though plenty deep enough, but then once inside it opens out into a huge space which could easily accommodate 100 yachts or more; Little Harbour is certainly not a little harbour.

The Cape Breton Smokehouse

Nicky had read about Little Harbour in the pilot book and had been intrigued by mention of the Cape Breton Smokehouse, which is on the shore of the lake.  This was our reason for not wanting to arrive too late – restaurants close early here by British standards.  We found the Smokehouse quite easily; there is a jetty and then a grassy track to the building, though there are lots and lots of nasty biting insects between the jetty and the building.  The Smokehouse, owned and run by a German couple who fell in love with the area during their own sailing adventure, is a log cabin restaurant that specialises in their home-produced smoked salmon.  We had their smoked salmon as a starter and it was delicious, quite thick, succulent slices with a very gentle smoky flavour, and the main course, blackened salmon, was almost as good.  But the restaurant was empty apart from us and a party of 4 German-speakers who left part way through our meal.  And the ambiance was rather as if they hadn’t expected to be open that day – strange on a Saturday.  Perhaps it’s the end of the season, perhaps the restaurant’s always like that but it did feel a little odd.  Nevertheless, we enjoyed our meal and returned happily to BV; happily expect for wanting to kill the myriad, tiny, biting, buzzing insects that accompanied us back to her.  Clearly we had eaten well so they felt that they could too!

Little Harbour, Bras d’Or Lake, NS, Canada