World’s Second Biggest Harbour
On an overcast August day, Haligonians glance up as a refitted Lark V American military vehicle called the Harbour Hopper drives into the world’s second biggest natural harbour. Sailboats blow down the Narrows, site of the world’s largest manmade explosion before the atomic bomb, while the world’s oldest continually operating salt water ferry service crisscrosses the grey waves.
Nova Scotia has a lot of boastful claims and Halifax Harbour is surely the epicenter. I’ve kayaked the Northwest Arm, sailed the Bedford Basin and even swam off Black Rock Beach in Point Pleasant Park, but feel I’ve only scratched the surface. I need to talk to someone who can give me a deeper take, so I call Bob Chaulk.
Chaulk, author of Time in a Bottle: Historic Halifax Harbour From the Bottom Up, has scuba dove the harbour more than 500 times since 1987. He agrees to meet me at Deadman’s Island, a peninsula on the Northwest Arm. We walk over the old, unmarked graves of hundreds of prisoners from nearby Melville Island and take a rocky seat at the harbour’s edge.
Chaulk describes a changing landscape that can only be seen in Persian carpet-sized chunks because of silt clouds and weak sunlight. The islands poking out of the harbour indicate dozens more hills that don’t break the surface. Huge boulders dropped by glaciers mix with piles of trash tidied together by the tide. There’s not much of what would normally be called treasure, but there are plenty of bottles and Chaulk has a fine collection covering 200 years.
A long, deep trench cut under the bridges reveals the path of an ancient river. It’s crossed by the rails and stone cribwork of the two bridges that previously connected the Dartmouth and Halifax shores before falling into the water more than 100 years ago. Divers hover over the seabed looking for disintegrated wrecks, buried at times in mud so deep it would come up to your waist if you stood on it.
Chaulk says it’s a strange, often creepy world down there.
“And what about the …. you know,” I say, unable to make eye contact. Chaulk bristles at the suggestion the lumpy brown substance might not be mud.
The sewage “floatables” are so-called for a reason, he says, and don’t trouble those beneath the surface.
I pepper him with questions about legends of the harbour. Is it truly home to a submerged parking lot? Chaulk confirms that in the 1960s, a ship’s cargo of Volvos suffered damage en route to Halifax. With permission, it dumped the cars into the Bedford Basin, where they sit today, though at 60 metres it’s too deep for divers to see first-hand.
How about the hole blasted by the Mont-Blanc in the 1917 Halifax Explosion? The bottom of the Narrows is half museum basement and half scrap yard, so it’s hard for divers to know what they’re looking at. Chaulk has seen an iron plating he suspects was part of the ship, a strange bank moving away from the shore which may have been created by the blast, and a collection of ocean liner trash that may have been swept together by the water forced away from the ship.
Some divers say the 250-year-old ferry route is visible in the form of hundreds of pop bottles and cans thrown overboard, but Chaulk thinks that describes the entire harbour.
The water is sparsely populated, but Chaulk has seen the notoriously ugly wolf fish, a few sharks, an Atlantic torpedo ray, a sunfish and plenty of seals. A bull seal swam slowly past him once, casting a lecherous eye, as if he was considering adding Chaulk to his harem.
While most of the ships wrecked in the harbour over the centuries are now in small, silt-buried pieces, one stands out. The Russian Kolkhosnik sank just outside the harbour near Sambro in 1942 and is a stunning sight today, with its cargo of World War Two tanks toppled over on the seabed.
Chaulk’s passion is infectious. In his book, he sums up his love of the underwater world as the thrill of “flying over a garden” and exploring outer space in your own backyard.
Plus, there are some nifty bottles down there.
Jon Tattrie is a freelance journalist and the author of Black Snow and The Hermit of Africville.