Kayaking Musquash Harbour



I got the bug to go Monday morning, the water was completely calm and the sunshine was brilliant.  It had to be on the Monday; Tuesday was out because of the forecast 20+ knot winds, plus the high tide was getting late, only occurring well after sunset.  The following two days were forecast to be breezy with showers, and the tides were still out of sync.

We first drove down to Five Fathom Hole.  It was two hours before high tide, and the flood was swirling past the wharf.  Getting downstream to the open part of the harbour would be a good workout, but if you were interested in exploring the Ducks Unlimited marshes upstream, you would have a free ride on a two knot current.  Two hours up with the flood, then another free ride back when the ebb started.

But the launching conditions there were iffy.  There is no ramp, and the only route to the rough, rocky beach was down an overgrown path through a thicket that was soggy from the recent rain.  I tried to push through but turned back when my foot sank deep into the muck in a boggy section.The other possibility was carrying the kayaks down the gangway to the float, but the risk of capsizing in deep, cold water put me off that option.  I already had my dunking for the season back on the Hammond River.

The alternative launch site for Musquash Harbour is Black Beach.  We decided to retrace our drive to Lorneville, then drove down to Colson Cove and on to Black Beach.  The last two kilometres were on a rough gravel road, but the beach itself is beautiful, with black sand as the name suggests.   By then it was almost 600 pm.  It was a lovely evening, too nice to resist, with a light westerly wind and no surf.

We paddled south toward the mouth of Musquash Harbour, led by a Great Blue Heron, past wild cliffs with jagged rock shelves.  Convoluted bright yellow stria framed shallow caves in the sheer limestone face.  We made it past the entrance buoy to the lighthouse before we had to turn back because of the approaching sunset.

The tide had advanced twenty feet up the beach in the short time we were gone.  The sun was down, leaving a blaze of yellow in the western sky.  We just had enough light to secure the kayaks to the car.  It was a really nice area to paddle.  But after a summer without them, the mosquitoes were a nuisance until we got afloat.  They were particularly bad at Five Fathom Hole, probably the result of all the rain we've had in the past couple of weeks.

There are islands in the harbour which need to be explored as well as some interesting beaches and inlets.  A number of features are only accessible at near high tide.  It would take five or six hours to make a complete circuit of the bay, and you would only want to do it in light winds, unless you were well experienced in open water kayaking.  It would be pretty hairy in a stiff southerly, particularly on an ebb tide.  On a satellite photo from Google Maps on such a day, I measured swells that were 140 feet crest to crest, along with obvious wind driven breaking waves that would have to be three or four feet high.

Musquash Harbour is a remarkably isolated bay with almost no human habitation.  Cottages used to dot the waterfront at Black Beach, but they are long gone, and now most of the land is controlled by the province, the Nature Conservancy or Ducks Unlimited. 

One caution bears repeating.  The harbour is three miles long and two miles across, big enough to produce dangerous conditions for the inexperienced.  If the marine forecast calls for winds of over 15 knots, the exposed areas of the harbour are no place for a novice.