Fundy National Park - Chignecto Campground

We drove just over 100 km up the road to Fundy National Park and checked in to Chignecto Campground today. We are looking forward to finding out what causes the great difference in tides in Fundy Bay while we are here.

Our campsite is lovely - surrounded by trees so we really cannot see any other RVs, though there are paths so we sometimes see folks walking by. It is also quite deep, though the entry is narrow, it was wide enough to get Miss Doozie backed in and in position. Plenty of room to park the Jeep in front.

An overlook of Fundy Bay as we drove down to the Visitor's Center.

As we were waiting to talk to one of the folks at the visitor center, I noticed the guy in front of us had on a "Cowtown" teeshirt, and that he gave a 972 area code phone number. I asked him where he was from in the Dallas area, and he was from Richardson. Turns out he is looking for a house in Coppell... hmmm!!! We exchanged cards to be able to contact each other.

We started on a drive that would take us to Hopewell Rocks but decided to go there another day. We stopped off to take some quick pictures of Cape Enrage Light.

We headed back towards the park to attend a ranger-led walk at Alma Beach. The tide here goes out about 1km between high and low tide. Our ranger was a very nice young lady who was very engaging with the children on the tour.

She told us that the major employment in the area is fishing, for lobster and for scallops. The lobster season just ended at the end of July, and the scallops season started at the beginning of August. She has a puppet of a scallop that she used to talk with us (she also had lobster puppets).

When we got to the beach, she used some audience members to teach us about tides. The two boys are representing the earth (tie-dye teeshirt) and the moon (white teeshirt), and their father (red teeshirt over to the left) represents the sun. Tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon on the earth. High tide occurs when the moon is above your particular longitude on the earth, and through centrifugal (or centripetal?) force, high tide also occurs at the longitude that is exactly opposite. As the earth turns, different longitude lines are directly "under" the moon and that is where the high tide is occurring. A second high tide comes at about 12 hours later when the moon is directly over the exact opposite side of the earth. The sun can also impact the height of the tides as its gravitational pull will add to the moon's, causing the highest tides are when the moon is at full or new because it is in line with the sun and the earth in a straight line.

 But, why does Fundy have such extremes in its tides? Most places in the world see about a 3' (1m) difference between high and low tide. In the Bay of Fundy, it can be up to 17m or 55', the size of a 5 story building! The way that our ranger-guide explained it, it is due to resonance. She gave the example of sitting in a deep tub with water in it. You could push with your hands to cause the water to create a wave up toward one end. If you kept in time with the wave, you could build it higher and higher until the water might slosh out of the tub. (You could also push out of sequence with the waves which would diminish the wave size and cause it to smooth out.) The size of the Bay of Fundy happens to correlate strongly with the timing of high and low tides - resonating with the tides. Thus, the tides of the Bay of Fundy see a huge variation between low and high tide.

This article also explains it well: http://www.bayfundy.net/hightides/hightides.html

After talking with us about the tides, we went on a walk to try to find creatures that live in the tidal area. The kids were having a great time... Dwayne and Patti were struggling to walk on the rocky shore.... so we didn't see many sea creatures, but we enjoyed looking at rocks!

We then walked into the town of Alma to see what we might see - the fishermen's days are controlled by the tides, they can only start or end their day when there is enough water to navigate into their dock.

I took this picture for cousin Jean!

And, since I didn't get a picture with the two of us today for the Facebook challenge, for day 5 of the 7 day challenge, I'll again use one from the past:

From the mule ride on Molokai in 1997 - Patti got the lead mule, "Elvira", and Dwayne rode "Lucky".