Digby

I came into Digby on the ferry from Saint John, New Brunswick, which is the correct way to arrive. The two-hour crossing of the Bay of Fundy puts you in the right relationship with the place — you have had time to watch the water change colour as the bay deepens, to see the mud-red of the New Brunswick coast give way to the blue-grey of open water, and to notice when the Nova Scotia shore begins to rise ahead of you with the particular quality of light that I came to think of as distinctly Atlantic: diffuse, silver, neither warm nor cold, enormously clear. The ferry docks at the Digby wharf and the first smell that comes aboard is the scallops.

Digby scallops are not merely good scallops. They are a specific phenomenon, pulled from the cold floor of the Bay of Fundy by one of the largest scallop fleets in the world, and their sweetness is the result of cold water and the particular mineral content of the bay bottom. What I can say is that eating a pan-seared Digby scallop at the wharf-side restaurant with nothing on it but salt and butter is one of the most satisfying bivalve experiences I have had, which is a sentence I never expected to write but find completely honest. Buy them at the fish market in the morning. They are still alive when they put them in the bag.

The Bay of Fundy tides are the largest in the world — up to 16 metres of tidal range in some locations — and Digby sits at the entrance to the bay, which means the experience is immediate and visible. At low tide, the harbour drains to expose enormous mud flats of reddish clay, and you can walk out onto the ocean floor and examine the creatures left behind: periwinkles, sea urchins, hermit crabs, the occasional stunned flounder. The smell is intense and oceanic — productive and ancient — and the sensation of walking where boats were floating two hours ago is one of those experiences that recalibrates your sense of how dynamic the planet’s surface is.

The whale watching from Digby is among the most reliable in Nova Scotia. The Bay of Fundy’s cold, upwelling waters bring feeding aggregations of humpbacks, fin whales, and minke whales from July through October, and the boats that go out from the wharf have an excellent record of close encounters. I spent three hours with a pair of humpbacks working a school of herring maybe 50 metres from the bow — close enough to hear the exhalation, close enough to see the barnacles on the flukes. There is nothing quite like the sound a humpback makes when it surfaces: a long, sonorous exhale that sounds like something between a sigh and a statement.

When to go: June through October for the full experience. July is peak scallop freshness before the summer waters warm too much, and the beginning of whale season. August and September bring the best whale watching odds. The ferry from Saint John runs year-round but summer schedules offer more crossings — booking in advance in July and August is essential.