Views on the way to Black Point

Black Point sits right of centre in photo #1, taken from the Meat Cove Road just west of the Salmon River east of Capstick. Capstick sits in the cove to the far left of this photo (and out of its scope, except that the westernmost of its houses can be seen on the hillside at the left). Meat Cove Road runs inland of the shore line above the ice from the far left to the centre, but comes back close to the coast outside Capstick—the previous photos were taken from where the nearest open water is seen in this photo—and can readily be seen about a third of the way up from the water as it curves around Black Point on its way to Meat Cove.

This view to the west shows open water very close to Black Point itself. The original reveals that the long dark line extending out from the point is a large incoming wave of water; although hard to see in this reduced version, there is another such wave further out in the Gulf beyond it. This photo also again shows the very jumbled texture of the sea ice along the near shore; that it looks smoother further out is but an artefact of the lighting.

After taking the pictures on the previous page on the outskirts west of Capstick, we continued west along Meat Cove Road, only to stop again a short ways down the road, this time about 1 km (0.6 mi) south of Black Point. I took another raft of photos there, but by this time, Cape North had already lost most of its sun and the winds were again blowing snow parallel to the Cape North Massif, making it far less clear than it had been heretofore. Some of that can be seen in photo #2 as one looks back towards the massif. The Nova Scotia Atlas names the closest point seen in this photo as Pats Point; the previous stop was along the eastern side of that point.

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Photo #3 was taken looking to the north out across the Cabot Strait. After noticing the considerable amount of haze or perhaps fog that seriously clouds this view, my eyes were next drawn to the several fairly massive ice floes interspersed with open water, being carried towards the shore by the action of the waves, collecting small pieces of ice floating in the open water as they come. The ice maps for the two days after we were here showed that much of the northern coast of Cape Breton had ice cover well out from the shore, so this ice must have later moved inshore; it didn’t last, however, and all of it was pretty much gone within a week after that. This is not always the case, as I learnt doing last year’s Cape Breton’s Winter Colours essay: some years it comes early and stays for a month or more. I count myself very lucky indeed to have seen it while it was still there!