Touring PEI

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Last night we saw the musical made of Ann of Green Gables at a local theater.  It was sweet, fun, and very well done.  There were many children in the audience, and the play spoke volumes to them, especially the girls, about keeping your values in the face of extreme adversity.  

We had the morning at leisure to stroll the town of Charlottetown and shop, and as we were preparing to leave our room, we saw a large four-masted ship come to the dock right outside our window:

It was a Chilean ship, the Esmeralda, on a friendship visit.  Well, they really know how to make an arrival!  Note in the photo above that the sailors are all up and down the forward mast.  Here’s a close-up:

As soon as the ship had docked, a brass band on board began to play, and all the sailors broke into song.  It was a spectacular arrival.  The singing went on for about 20 minutes before the sailors all climbed down from the rigging. Click the arrow in the middle of the photo:

We left town at mid-day, and, on our way to the crustacean fishing grounds on the north side of the island, we had a lecture on mussels, oysters and lobsters.  There are extensive mussel farms here, and PEI exports some ten billion (that’s ten thousand million) mussels a year.  We could identify the mussel farms in some of the offshore bays.  The waters here are warmer than you would expect, as the Great Lakes water coming down the St. Lawrence River keeps the water in the St. Lawrence Bay a few degrees warmer than the surrounding ocean waters.  

At Covehead we visited the shore base of a lobstering operation and learned about lobster fishing in detail, including more about the restrictions and the rotating permissions for when to set traps.  The lobster fishers rent out their traps when their home waters are not being fished.

A few miles down the north coast is Brackley Beach, a popular swimming area in the summer.  Now, summer has a different definition here.  When we visited the beach, wearing light jackets, the air temperature was 23 C. (73 F.) with a stiff wind coming off the ocean.  The ocean water was 18 C. (64 F.) but it’s mid-summer after all, and this is as good as it gets.  People were swimming.  The beach is backed by marvelous grass-covered dunes which are protected—there’s no walking on them:

The province has a resident sandcastle artist who runs a class every Wednesday on sandcastle building.  There were lots of students building wonderful things:

As short way down the beach was a walk which led to a rocky outcropping where members of a flock of cormorants came and went while fishing in the sea:

The area is truly beautiful.  We then did an obligatory visit to the house with the green gables which was the location for the story told in the book Anne of Green Gables.  This is a complete industry here.  L. M. Montgomery wrote the first volume of the series, the original, in the small town of Cavendish, and the house with the green gables which she used in the story has been turned into a small theme park.  Here’s the house:

I won’t bother with photos of the barn, the buggy, the dozens of girls trying on Anne clothes with Anne wigs (red with braids) and having photos taken.  We visited.  That’s eough.

Finally, we went to a lobster institution for dinner.  The New Glasgow Lobster Suppers is a vast dining room where they serve, lobster, lobster, and lobster.  But if you don’t eat shellfish you can get a flatfish dinner, or chicken.  The first course is fish chowder (or tomato soup) and a bucket of mussels, the second course is three salads on one plate—green, potato, and coleslaw, then the large lobster, then pie with ice cream.  The place is enormous:

We had a chance to go under the restaurant to see the lobster pens, from which they serve 700 a day, every day, and store up to 20,000 lobsters:

All the lobster cooking is done by one bored-looking guy in four very large pots:

Tomorrow we’ll get up early to leave before 7:00 to get the ferry to Cape Breton Island.