The main activity for the day was a driving tour: Lubec to Campobello via Ferry to Deer Island via Ferry to Saint George New Brunswick to Saint Andrews to Saint Stephens to Callais US then back to Lubec [on land]. Very Scenic. Canada, as always, is very "tidy" compared to the US. But early in the evening, we took a tour of the intertidal mudflats at low tide. One of the sights here is the Tides at around 20 feet. The magnitude of the Tide is most visible on the mudflats. The Bay of Fundy is a closed system, so when the Tide come in, there’s no place for the water to go and it accumulates in the Bay – Tides reaching up to almost 50 feet at the upper end.
We’re used to the tides in the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s a comparison between Apalachicola Florida and Lubec Maine [note the longer days]:
| DATE | HIGH | LOW |  |
 |
||||||||
| AM | hgt | PM | hgt | AM | hgt | PM | hgt | rise | set | qtr | ||
| Lubec Maine | ||||||||||||
| 16 | Fri | 2:46 | 20.1 | 3:15 | 19.8 | 9:13 | -1.8 | 9:41 | -1.0 | 4:57 | 8:11 | |
| 17 | Sat | 3:40 | 19.3 | 4:09 | 19.5 | 10:06 | -1.1 | 10:37 | -0.6 | 4:58 | 8:10 | |
| 18 | Sun | 4:37 | 18.5 | 5:06 | 19.1 | 11:01 | -0.3 | 11:35 | -0.2 | 4:59 | 8:09 |  |
| Apalachicola Florida |
||||||||||||
| 16 | Fri | 8:18 | 1.6 | 8:17 | 1.4 | 1:56 | 0.3 | 2:40 | 0.7 | 6:50 | 842 | |
| 17 | Sat | 8:39 | 1.6 | 9:52 | 1.2 | 2:23 | 0.6 | 3:57 | 0.5 | 6:51 | 8:41 | |
| 18 | Sun | 9:05 | 1.7 | – | – | 2:44 | 0.9 | 5:20 | 0.3 | 6:51 | 8:41 | |
In Fundy Bay, the Tide is alway coming in or going out, sometimes both making whirlpools and waves in odd places. This is a piece of Old Sow off of Deer Island, the world’s largest whirlpool [not at its peak time of day].
In Lubec, the Embayment is a huge mudflat, stretching to the horizon – the mother of clam diggers sites when there’s no Red Tide or Moon Snails.
The result is that at low Tide, you are literally walking on the ocean floor – or at least a piece that is inhabited by things that can survive coming to the surface a couple of times a day. Those rocks in the background are actually the base for seaweed forests when the tide is in.
The mudflat is dotted with countless mounds often with strands of poop [left above]. If you dig them up, there are many critters, mostly sea worms in an infinite variety of shapes and colors. Fast photography is required, because they dig themselves out of sight in seconds with their many legs. Underneath the seaweed, the drag markings of the ancient glacier that shaped this part of the world still show [a home for limpets that cling to the smooth stone]:
Beside the stringy nodular seaweed and epiphytes [sort of like undersea Spanish Moss], there are huge pieces of kelp around [the one on the lower left is called "shotgun kelp"] and "sea lettuce":
And finally, the old shells strewn across the flat are often crusted with a hard mineralized multicolored "plant coral."
As if it needed to be said, I preferred the mudflat adventure to the restored and tidy buildings of the British Loyalists in Saint Andrews.
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