Taken 2009 January 18 from Green Point
GPS 46°06.???'N 61°29.???'W
This photograph is copyright © 2009 by Charlotte Miller,
remains the sole property of the photographer,
and has been used here with explicit permission.
Again taken on the same day as the two previous photos, this view looks towards the west from the flanks of Mabou Harbour Mountain. In this view, it is clear that there is a considerable amount of ice along the northern shore at the mouth of the Mabou River and that it extends well beyond into the Gulf of St Lawrence (Northumberland Strait).
The houses one sees from the left out to the middle of the photo just above the shore along the coastal plain to the left of and below the trees in the foreground lie along Green Point Road, a gravel road that continues on from the west end of the paved Mabou Harbour Road to the turnaround some distance inland of Green Point. Green Point itself can be reached by traversing on foot the fields beyond the turnaround, which latter is a very popular spot for watching the usually spectacular sunsets over the Gulf.
In this photo, what takes my eye are the multiple colours of the icy waters, from pure white to dark grey to the bluer colours reflecting the sky which must surely be open water, and the surprising apparent movement caused by the various lines these differing colours form as one’s eyes are drawn along them across the photo’s width. Particularly at the left of the photo, there seems to be a considerable amount of haze or, more likely, fog in the air. The white clouds rising well out on the Gulf, though lower and more diffuse, are not too dissimilar from the cloud bank in the third photo in this essay and probably formed from the same causes. In spite of the shapes on the far horizon that one can imagine might be land, the straight line distance nearly due west from Green Point across the Gulf to Georgetown (Prince Edward Island) is roughly 85 km (52.5 mi); even on a very clear day, it is rare that one can see PEI across the Strait here, though it is possible on occasion, given enough elevation, from further north, where the distance is somewhat smaller.¹
¹ For some strange reason, I have seen Cape Breton from eastern Prince Edward Island much more frequently than I have seen eastern Prince Edward Island from Cape Breton, even when one considers exactly the same pair of locations, e.g., East Point (PEI) and Margaree Harbour (CB), both of which are at the same relative elevations and directly across the Strait from each other. The light cast by the sun must have some bearing on this, but it still seems a rather inexplicable phenomenon to me.↩