Digby

I smelled Digby before I saw it — that particular brine of a working harbour, diesel and salt and something faintly sweet underneath, which turned out to be the scallop shells stacked at the processing sheds. The fog had rolled in off the Bay of Fundy that morning and hadn’t fully left by noon, hanging over the wharf in a way that made the boats look like they were emerging from a photograph rather than the sea. Digby doesn’t perform for visitors. It’s a fishing town first, with the world’s largest scallop fleet tied up at its government wharf, and everything else — the inn on the hill, the handful of restaurants, the tourists like me wandering with a coffee — feels secondary to the actual business of pulling shellfish out of Fundy’s brutal tides.

Those tides are the whole story here. The Bay of Fundy has the highest tidal range on Earth, sometimes over twelve metres between low and high, and in Digby you watch it happen in real time — boats that were floating comfortably at 9am are sitting in mud by early afternoon, their hulls resting at odd angles like toys left out after bath time. The Digby scallop itself, harvested from these churned, mineral-rich waters, is famously large and sweet, and eating one pan-seared at a dockside shack, still warm, was the kind of unfussy culinary moment that no Michelin-starred kitchen back in France has quite matched for me.

Digby Neck and the whales

South of town, Digby Neck is a long, narrow finger of land stretching into the Bay of Fundy, ending in the islands of Long Island and Brier Island. I drove it on a whim, following signs for whale watching, and it turned into one of the best afternoons I’ve had in Atlantic Canada. The waters off Brier Island are a feeding ground for finback and humpback whales through the summer, drawn by the nutrient upwelling the Fundy tides create, and our boat — a small outfit run by a family who’d clearly been doing this for generations — found a pair of humpbacks within forty minutes, close enough that the spray from their blowholes drifted onto the deck. Nobody on board, guides included, stopped being delighted by it, which told me something about how this place regards its own wildlife.

The Annapolis Basin

Back in town, the Annapolis Basin at dusk is its own kind of theatre — the fog thickens, the lights of the fleet blur into soft halos, and the Digby Pines resort sits above it all like it’s watching over the harbour. I ate scallops three nights running and did not once regret it. The Wharf Rat Rally, a massive motorcycle gathering held every Labour Day weekend, apparently turns the town briefly upside down, but I came in the quieter shoulder season and got the version of Digby that felt more honest — a working port, doing what it’s always done, indifferent to whether anyone’s watching.

When to go: July through September for the calmest whale-watching conditions and the peak of scallop season; expect fog regardless of month, it’s part of the deal on the Fundy coast.