St Peter’s Bras d’Or Lakes NS Canada

(Top) From BV looking up towards St Peter’s Lions Club Marina (Bottom) BV (on the right) from the marina 

It’s a small marina but quite busy

We spent a couple of days off St Peter’s at anchor, catching up with admin and doing some low-level routine maintenance and food shopping as well, of course, as having a good look around St Peter’s.

Main street in St Peter’s

St Peter’s is a small place but with a big sense of community.  When we went ashore at the marina on the Saturday there was a craft sale going on in the room under the marina offices.  On the main street a local farmer was selling his fruit and veg from at a roadside stall behind his lorry.

Views out across St Peter’s Bay from the road to St Peter’s

We walked out of town along the main road enjoying the views across St Peter’s Bay.  Signs pointed to a walking trail along the shoreline.

St Peter’s Canal mural

Shortly before we turned back into town we came to one of the town’s churches, with a great mural about the canal underneath it, painted by a local artist.

Look out across Strachan’s Cove from above the marina

Dinner – we haven’t had mussels for ages

There’s a good FoodLand in St Peter’s and we stopped in on both days, on the Sunday to do a big shop before heading into the Lakes (provisioning is generally poor around the Lakes except at Baddeck and St Peter’s) and on the Saturday for a recce before returning the next day.  And the recce resulted in an impulse buy of a pack of mussels for dinner – delicious!

Our final task in St Peter’s was to find out where we could get our soon-to-run-out gas bottle refilled. As it turns out, there is a car parts place in town (Auto Quest) which fills propane cylinders (note to self it’s a propane cylinder in N America, not a gas bottle; that’d be a container for petrol!).  The shop was, of course, closed for most of the weekend but on Monday morning we took our cylinder in to see if it could be filled or sent off to be filled.  The answer was that they fill on site and on spec so we took our cylinder around the back to see the chap who had a lorry-load of empty cylinders to work through and asked if he would fill ours. He wasn’t keen.  It’s a UK Calor Gas cylinder circa 2013 and has a normal UK-style valve on it (well, it was normal when we were last in the UK) which lets the gaspropane out as soon as you open the valve.  In North America, these have now been replaced by valves which will only let the propane out if a connector is correctly fitted to the valve.  They call it a safety valve.  Ah-ha!! That explains why at Deltaville our cylinder had been returned to us with the news that it couldn’t be filled because it didn’t have a safety valve (which, of course, it does – an over-pressure safety valve but not a ‘safety valve’ as the Americans and Canadians know it).  Anyway, the chap put some propane into our cylinder for us (it would be carried back to the boat outside and then put nto our self draining gas locker), which was a relief, having given us a stern talking to about the dangers of the valve on it.  Our gas bottles, however, are due for a pressure check in 2019 and, with the added complication of the ‘safety valve’ issue, it looks as if we would be well served replacing them sooner rather than later.  That’s more tricky than it sounds.  The bottles we have only just fit into our gas locker and are an entirely different shape to the vast majority that we have seen in the USA and Canada.  But we did see some at WalMart in Halifax that might just work for us and a bit of Google action has located a supplier of another cyclinder that would work too.  So with that win for the internet and plenty of propane on board for cooking all the food that we had just bought, were all set to disappear off into the Lakes.

St Peter’s, Bras d’Or Lake, NS, Canada