I just looked up The Bay of Fundy on Google maps, having not heard of it before. I'm interested, can you explain what about this particular bay will make it interesting?
Yes, and it is always COLD. (Newly engaged I took my fiancée to a beach west of Saint John and decided to go for a swim. I mean, I should have known better, I grew up there. It was a shallow slope, so by the time it was deep enough to dive in, I couldn’t feel my ankles. It was a short swim. It’s not like I was going to wimp out and turn back in front of my sweetie. Ah, the pride of youth.)
Re the tides: when Charles ame Diana visited NB in 1983, they disembarked at high tide in the Saint John harbour. The gangplank was at about 45 degrees, slopes down to the dock. A few hours later, it was 45 degrees down to the royal yacht. Some of the sailors, many of whom had long experience, having served in the falklands, among other places, had never seen anything like it.
True, true. But imagine those tides in a slightly larger bay: 52km wide at the entrance (compared with ~14km for Severn), mostly linear (48km near its neck, compared with ~2km) and over 155km long.
The amount of water that comes in an out twice a day is, well, nuts. Yes, that's the technical term.
(Summer ferry crossings between Digby Neck and Saint John are 2.5 hours, 3.0 hours in the winter (slower due to rougher water), but I do know people who took ~12 one February: the water was so rough they hugged as close to the shores of NB and NS as they dared, just to make things a little calmer. There have also been cases of transport trailers falling over in the hold. Yes, they were lashed down.)
(I once spent a terrible several hours sprawled on a lounge chair staring out the window on the opposite side of the boat: For seven seconds I could see nothing but sea, the ship swung, and for seven more, nothing but sky. Repeat. Ad nauseam. The swings took about a second. When I finally did get up to head to the heads to unload that nausea, let's just say planning was involved in every step.)
(Another trip, I also spent an uncomfortable few minutes on the observation deck bow-ward of that lounge, because young and dumb: It was fall, I was heading back to Uni, it was cold (duh), I was wearing a hoodie and shorts, and I'd stepped out for fresh air. Got talking to American tourists in long slacks and sweaters. Felt expansive and loquacious, kept them out there as long as I could. They finally excused themselves on account of the cold, very polite, and I turned to and leaned upon the bow rail until I felt enough time had gone by that I could return to the lounge. Man, it was cold. Ah, youth. :->)
Yes. I've seen its tides in person. It's almost unreal. Boats go from sitting on their sides on dry land to floating in 3+m of water and back every tidal cycle.
At first I was thinking that that doesn't sound all that unusual; here near Antwerp, Belgium we also have tides high enough that small boats can go from sitting dry to floating clear. But then I looked it up and it turns out that the tidal range in the Bay of Fundy is about 16 metres (52 feet)! That really is a lot, and much more than the about 5.5 metres we have here.
