Meat Cove from Black Point

Friday morning, it was, alas time to leave Meat Cove and head back down to Southwestern Inverness County for the week-end of music that awaited me. At Meat Cove, the day was as beautiful as the previous afternoon and I hoped to get numerous photos on the always beautiful trip south. I first stopped at Black Point, from which the photos on this page were taken.

Photo #1 looks to the west from Black Point; Meat Cove (the water) is in the foreground and Meat Cove (the village) is at the centre left of the photo. A lobsterman is busy checking his traps in the placid waters. Blackrock Point and Little Grassy are in the foreground at the right. In the background is Cape St Lawrence; much of the shore between Blackrock Point and Cape St Lawrence is exposed rock; the tilt is so sharp that vegetation is unable to find any foothold in which to put down roots and the constant winds off the Gulf of St Lawrence would make the precarious perch even less tenable. Note the grey band just above the water in the Gulf beyond Cape St Lawrence: it is a fog bank that extends high above the water; a lingering remnant is still high in the air behind the (unnamed) mountain in the centre of the photo.

Photo #2 is a telephoto view of Cape St Lawrence that better shows the exposed rocks between Blackrock Point (in the foreground) and Cape St Lawrence (in the far distance). When seen from a boat, the reds of the rocks are much more vivid than they appear here. On summer days when the whales are feeding off Cape St Lawrence, the Oshan Whale Watch tours out of Bay St Lawrence bring one up close to this most interesting shore, whose rocks tower high above you; I can heartily recommend their fine tours and knowledgeable guides.

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Photo #3 is a telephoto view of Meat Cove that shows the beach, the campground, and the lobsterman checking his traps in the waters off shore. It also gives a pretty good idea of the differential in the heights of the cliffs by the campground from the beach side to the other side of the point.

Photo #4 is another telephoto view of Meat Cove, this time showing the Cape Breton Highlands rising above the village. This photo offers a brief glimpse of the trail up the highlands that leads to Cape St Lawrence and Lowland Cove (as well as the Meat Cove Look-Off) that begins to the right of the highest house visible in this photo; most of its course is but a line through the trees, but a short section of its surface is visible in the upper centre left of the photo shortly before it makes a curve to the left. This trail often parallels a brook, unnamed on the topographical maps, that spills over the cliffs beyond the northwest end of the campground (the wet cliff over which it spills can also be seen in photo #3).

I wished I could stay longer in this marvelous and peaceful place, but I had had a wonderful stay and left with many pleasant memories and lots of photos. Once I reached Bay St Lawrence, fog was again hanging down over the massif as it had done yesterday; I ran into a wall of fog/clouds along the Atlantic coast as I reached Sugar Loaf north of Cape North village; so I got no photos along Aspy Bay on the east side of the Cape North Massif. Half of North Mountain was in fog at Sunrise, but I briefly saw blue skies and sun at its summit, only to run into fog and clouds again at Pleasant Bay. There was a brief sunny interval at the web cam on French Mountain, but the fog/clouds prevailed as I came into Chéticamp and it stayed overcast the rest of the way south. So, I took no photos worth putting in this essay on the way to Mabou. So much for the hoped for photo shoot on the trip back.