Farewell to Nova Scotia 2 - the Navy Past and Present

During our last week in NS before leaving for Alberta, Kay and I had the chance to wander through Halifax a bit, following the harbour trail from Pier 21 along the waterfront. We thirstily passed the Garrison Brewing Company (I'm going to miss their beer as well as Propellor, another excellent Halifax brewery) and found ourselves in front of HMCS Sackville, Canada's World War Two maritime memorial..

Sackville is the last of over two hundred small warships, called corvettes, built by Canada as a response to the German submarine fleet. They were made famous by the British sailor and writer, Nicholas Montsarrat, whose novel, The Cruel Sea, was mde into what for my money is one of the top ten WW2 films ever made.

For a small fee, you can board her at the dock and tour the ship, guided by recorded comments in most compartments.

A corvette as she would have appeared in wartime.



Sackville at rest in Halifax today. The blue and white paint pattern was a surprise to me, as I expected a neutral navy gray, but a young sailor in charge of ticket sales (nice PAT job) explained to me that it was a disruptive (camouflage) pattern, similar to the dazzle ship idea of the First World War, to make it hard for UBoat captains to judge direction and distance of their targets.





The interior of the Sackville is incredibly cramped and highly efficient, with no space wasted. The introvert in me shuddered to think of living and working with a hundred other men for long weeks on end, even though I would jump at the chance to work as a shipboard padre before my CF career ends.

The tradition continued. HMCS Athabaskan berthed nearby Sackville. Regrettably she wasn't open to visitors during our time there.

Farewell to Nova Scotia 1 - Nova Scotia is a Fowl Place

Before our flight out to Medicine Hat on August 4th, Kay and I had a chance to spend several days in Halifax, doing and seeing things we never had the opportunity to do during our posting in Greenwood.

Kay made a friend in Halifax's lovely Public Gardens Park.



And another, larger goose, outside the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia :





Interpreter in full historical costume at the Fortress of Louisbourg:

Going Gaga for Singing, Dancing, Marching Soldiers

This is what it looked like in the Halifax Metro Centre last night at the final dress rehearsal of the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo. I was able to attend thanks to a friend who is a Tattoo staffer - I think most of the packed crowd last night were there on comp tickets, and we were all treated to a fabulous three hour show of marching troops, military bands, pipes and drums, acrobatics, dancers, choirs, etc.



The theme of the 2010 Tattoo was largely naval, reflecting the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Navy, and there was a good naval presence not only from Canada but from Germany and a fine marching band composed of retired US Marines. Acrobats, cyclists and gymnasts from France,the Netherlands and Estonia added some comic and at times heart-stopping moments. The Tattoo runs from July 1 to 8 and if you are in or near Halifax, I heartily recommend it, and also recommend that you leave ample time to find parking near the Metro Centre.

I have no one to blame but myself (she's like a train wreck, I can't help myself for looking) for watching Lady Gaga's new video "Alejandro". This is sort of relevant to my post because the video starts with what appear to be marching and dancing soldiers, though God alone knows for what reason. Unfortunately for her and her dancing soldiers, the Tattoo is a family show, so don't expect to see Lady Gaga in the program any time soon.

Speaking of Lady Gaga and marching soldiers (you were wondering where I was going with this, weren't you?), I was delighted to come across this piece about how some real soldiers, with the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, have made their own spoof of another Lady Gaga video, "Telephone". It's good to see that the fine tradition of the viral comic military music video is being continued. One of the participants in the US video, a Sgt. Aaron Melcher, has already acquired his own Facebook following. One wonders what the Taliban make of it all. I would definitely go back to the Tattoo if they booked these 82nd AB guys do their Lady Gaga thing.

No Drag Dragon Boat Day

14 Wing's Dragon Boat team participated in an event on Lake Banook, Datmouth (near Halifax) as part of the Kiwanis Make-a-wish Community Dragon Boat Festival on Sept. 26th. Organized by a young and energetic air maintenance lieutenant and with a wide range of trades, ranks and ages represented, we scraped together about 20 adventurous souls. About half of us made a trip down the previous Thursday to practice for an hour, and for many of us, including myself, that was the first time in a dragon boat.

I'm reasonably comfortable in a canoe, but the dragon boat paddle and stroke are quite different than canoe paddling. Timing is everything, and a good vertical insertion of the paddle's blade into the water is essential. After one practice, we were grateful we were just doing the 200 metre distance, and not the full 2 kilometres.

14 Wing team demonstrates close order drill with their paddles:



Dragon boats on the lake, preparing for a heat. Most of the day the sun was out, but it was often quite cold.




Mike the Paddling Padre:



In our first heat, we barely came in under a minute for 200 metres. Our competition was much younger, with at least one group being from a local cadet corps. A lot of folks had more paddling experience than we did. However in our second heat we decreased our time by a few seconds and we were more together. You can soon tell watching a boat if the crew is working together, and you can feel the difference in the boat when all the blades are in the water at the same time.

Here we are heading out for our third and final heat of the day. That's me seated third up from the back in the black ball cap:



Our coxswain or steersperson or whatever the appropriate dragon boat term is was very experienced and was kindly leant to our team. Without him we wouldn't have done nearly so well.

The final heat, all straining to be first to the finish:



It wasn't about winning, but we were pleased to be awarded gold. Another team came ahead of us (platinum elite paddlers, maybe?) but we all felt good about the day and about the $3000+ we raised for Kiwanis Make-a-wish charity. Here we are at the awards bit afterwards:



I'm told that a new dragonboat can start at $5000 and easily go up to $15K. We are hoping to lobby the Wing to buy a dragon boat for a permanent team, and do more of this. Judging by the day, it would be good investment in morale and team spirit.

Out and About in Nova Scotia

Just leaving for a five day tip up to the north shore of the Bay of Fundy, including a trip to the fossil museum at Joggins. We're hoping that Hurrican Bill or Bob or Billy-bog or whatever its name is will leave us in peace but it looks like we'll get a piece of it.

Here are some shots of places we saw last Sunday further west down the Valley and on the coast above Bridgetown.


Hayfield by the Bay of Fundy, near Port George.



Coo, rock on the beach at Cottage Cove, pretending to be a creature from the original Star Trek.



Other strange creatures on the beach.




View of the Annapolis Valley through the trees at the lookoff at Valleyview Provincial Park, above Bridgetown.



Another view from from the same spot, overlookig Bridgetown;



Beautiful seaside water garden constructed by Chester and Dot Reese, who live near Cottage Cove on the Bay of Fundy, near Port George.



Chester and Dot raise plants for sale. Here are some of their lillies. The remarkable thing about these two is that they're in their eighties and do all of their own work:

A Night With Ensemble Polaris

What do a hurdy gurdy, a bass clarinet, a set of bagpipes, and Norwegian lyrics add up to? A rocking good time is the answer, as I discovered this weekend when I discovered Ensemble Polaris. The concert was one of the offerings of the Evergreen Theatre, one of the cultural treasures of the Annapolis Valley. Normally the Evergreen concerts are held in their wonderful hall at East Margaretsville on North Mountain, but this won was held at the old Trinity Anglican Church in Middleton. Old Trinity it the only unaltered church in Nova Scotia built by United Empire Loyalists - the first service there was 1791.



The old church was a suitable setting for music that, in some cases goes back to early Norse myths and legends (though a lot of the set list was original stuff). I could certainly understand why they bill themselves as "Canada's premiere Arctic Fusion Band".

You can listen to some of EP's music here. Ensemble Polaris definitely rates a tip of the padre's beret - go see them if you get the chance!

A New Adventure in Atlantic Canada

Kay finished work at Den Hahn's nursery for the summer yesterday and for the first time this summer we had a Sunday together.

After checking out King's Presbyerian Church in New Minas, and enjoying a very warm welcome and a laid-back summer service there (I'm sure we'll be back), we followed the advice of a coworker and drove an hour to Nova Scotia's south shore to check out a coastal feature called The Ovens.

After making our way slowly through a very crowded Mahone Bay, and passing through Lunenburg just as the yearly folk festival was coming to an end, we made our way to Ovens Natural Park.

Since the tide was just coming in we didn't see anything this spectacular:



However, the clifftop walk and the chance to descend to five natural caves was worth the $18 admission to the park. The sea has carved long openings into the side of the cliffs along a stretch of several kilometres, and as the waves rolled in, the sound, amplified inside the caves, reminded me of the humpback whale we met during a tour off Brier Island last summer. Sadly we left the camera at home but there are some photos on the park website here. We are planning to return and camp at one of the clifftop sites there before the summer is over.

As an added bonus, we had a spectacular view of the Bluenoose II, the replica of Nova Scotia's most famous ship, as she sailed out of Lunenburg. The Bluenose II is operated by the Lunenburg Maritime Museum Society and offers tours.


This photo of her from the website pretty much captures what we saw. An unforgettable sight, and one that has us thinking about taking a cruise on her next summer.

A lovely day to be out exploring Nova Scotia., and an appetizer for travels planned later this month during my leave.

The Strange Hopefulness of Military Gardeners

This spring Kay and I have been busy with gardening projects. Growing things is Kay's raison d'etre, and I love her passion for all growing things (well, except for roses, which is a long story). One of the sacrifices Kay makes for my career (as she tells me, I joined, she didnt) is the fact that she will never see the things we plant grow to their maturity, since we will likely be posted out of Greenwood in a year or two, and so on for the rest of my career. So it is with most military families.

Here's one of our recent editions, a weeping Colorado spruce (Kay hasn't named him yet).



We're also breaking ground for a new garden and since our soil is so sandy, the plants will need all the help they can get:



And here are some of the plants waiting to go into the new garden bed:



As it happens, for my dose of junk fiction I recently finished John Winton's 1967 novel, HMS Leviathan, about a traditional naval officer who fins himself struggling with a changing service (John Winton was the pen name of LCmdr John Pratt, a Royal Navy engineer turned journalist and author, who died in 2001). I was taking a break from gardening one Sunday afternoon and this passage jumped out at me. The protagonist is visiting friends in naval married quaters at Portsmouth and is thinking about the transient nature of the people living in these houses.

"He had noticed the gardens, and had been struck by the care taken of them. A few had been roughly dug over, and no more, but most had been carefully and imaginatively tended as though the occupants had bought the house, There was something touching about the gardens. They had shrubs, planted by people who might never see them flower, and potatotes, which might be eaten by the next tennants, and roses, which may have been pruned by one and would be picked by the next." (John Wnton, HMS Leviathan, Sphere Books, 1967 p, 203).

A good tribute to the strange and persistent hopefulness of military gardners everywhere.

Visit Historic, Creepy Nova Scotia

OK, is it anyone else, or just me, who finds the cover of this brochure just a little bit creepy?

Musical Adventures in Nova Scotia

This afternoon Kay (Mrs. Padre) and I drove across Nova Scotia to the south shore - our destination being the historic port town of Lunenburg. St. John's, Lunenburg was the venue for a concert by two musical choirs: The first was the Ernst Family Singers, a Lunenburg-based family choir consisting of parents Gregg and Jennie and their eight (!) children. They were unknown to us and would prove to be a delightful surprise. The other choir was the Togni Consort, a group specializing in Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony, under the direction of Peter-Anthony Togni, who is well known to long-time listeners of CBC Two (or, to show my age, CBC FM). The concert was arranged by the St. Cecelia Concert Society, whose website describes their role as being "the premiere presenter of classical music in Atlantic Canada".

The venue for the concert couldn't have been lovelier. St. John's Anglican Church is the second-oldest Anglican church in Canada, and is in the centre of the beautiful port town of Lunenburg, which is a UNESCO world heritage site. On a personal note, Bishop Bruce Howe, who ordained me when he served as Bishop of Huron in 2004, was rector of St. John's from 1980 to 1988. The current Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Fred Hiltz, was also rector of St. John's from 1988 to 1995.



St. John's maintains an excellent website and offers a virtual tour whose pictures are far better than the few poor digital pics I was able to take inside the church. One of the astonishing and inspiring things about the church is that it was virtually destroyed by fire in 2001, but was lovingly restored to its original 18th century appearance. You would be hard pressed to realize this fact if you were sitting inside and didn't know the story. This bell, donated by the Jessen family, was recovered from the church and now sites outside the church to tell the story.



The inside is ornate and dignified, in the Anglican neo-Gothic tradition of leaving no space undecorated. Here's a quick shot I sneaked of some of the Ernst family opening the concert.



The program of music was lovely and ambitious. In honour of today being Easter Sunday for the Orthodox Church, Togni chose several pieces from the Russian tradition, including sacred music by Sergei Rachmaninoff which complimented the male voices of his singers and of the Ernst family. The Ernsts - wow. I was expecting some sort of cliched gospel-signing family, but right off the bat they were dazzling, offering a polyphonic rendering of Psalm 97.3, Viderunt Omnes, where the individual syllables soared and stretched and interwove brilliantly. The Ernst family includes some talented arrangers - John Ernst gave us a lovely version of the spiritual "I am a Poor Wayfarin' Stranger". Together with the Togni Consort, the Ernsts gavea wonderful homage to Canadian black composer Nathaniel Dett, offering a beautiful rendering of his "Listen to the Lambs".

Kay and I drove the ninety minutes back to Greenwood well and truly fed by this wonderful afternoon of music. At times our little part of the province seems backward and isolated, but days like this remind us what a lovely and culturally rich place Nova Scotia can be. If you get the chance to catch the Ernsts and/or the Togni Consort, do so. You won't be disappointed.

Cool Airplane Night

Last week I was asked to attend the Air Force Mess Dinner, a big affair here at 14 Wing, Greenwood. The dinner celebrated the 100th anniversary of powered flight in Canada, and was located in a hangar belonging to 413 Search and Rescue Squadron. The hanger allowed the dinner to feature as set pieces two antique aircraft.

One was the replica of the Silver Dart, the first powered aircraft in Canada, which made its first flight here in Nova Scotia, at Baddeck Bay, on 23 February, 1909. Here's a link to the Silver Dart Project's website picture of the replica making it's centennial anniversary flight this year:



And the original:



Here's the same replica aircraft, which was disassembled and shipped to Greenwood for the Air Force mess dinner, as it appeared behind the head table.







One of the guests of honour at the dinner was retired Canadian astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason, who piloted the replica Silver Dart this February. Here he is wearing considerably less gear than he did on the Space Shuttle.



Tryggvason offered some very interesting remarks on piloting both the Silver Dart and the Shuttle, and dropped a few jaws when he described how much fuel it takes to get the Shuttle into orbit. He certainly underscored how much technological change has occured in one century.

Also present behind the head table was a rebuilt Avro Anson, a training aircraft that was used extensively here in Canada to train Allied aircrew during the Second World War. This aircraft has been lovingly restored but is not airworthy.









The other guest speaker was the Chief of the Air Staff, Lt. General Angus Watt, who circulated amongst the audience with a microphone, asking people to say how old the Canadian Air Force is (I guessed 100, which is wrong, but he should have known better than to ask a guy in an army red mess jacket). The correct answer can be found in the book that the CAS announced, a little publication, On Windswept Heights, which tells the history of military aviation in Canada. It can be downloaded here. General Watt reminded us that experts generally suck at predicting the future, and that the Air Force, together with the rest of the Canadian Armed Forces, would be kept busy preparing and training for an uncertain future.

For my part, I showed the fruits of the last three month's second language training by saying the grace in both official languages.

A Day With Tusker 313

Since I've been posted to 14 Wing at CFB Greenwood, my training has prevented me from spending much time on the operational side of the base. Yesterday I had the chance to see what the Air Force does thanks to Captain Leighton James of 413 Search and Rescue Squadron. Leighton is currently doing French Second Language Training with me, and since the language school was closed for spring break this week, Leighton was able to get airborne and invited me along. Leighton is a CF130 Hercules pilot, a native of Dundas, Ontario and like myself an alumnus of the University of Toronto. Friday, March 20th was a gorgeous day for flying. The fligh t's call sign was Tusker 313 - Tusker for 413 Search and Rescue Squadron, which has an elephant on its crest, while 313 is the name of the aircraft (the "Herc" in air force speak). . Tusker 313 carried the pilot/commander Leighton, two other pilots, a navigator, a loadmaster, three Search and Rescue Tehcnicians (SARtechs) and myself. The purpose of the mission was to conduct training over New Ross at the east end of the Annapolis Valley, then proceed to Nova Scotia's south shore for training with a Coast Guard cutter, and then to the former air force base at Summerside, Prince Edward Island for a parachute drop by the SARtechs, refuelling and lunch. In the afternoon we were to return to Greenwood, do another SARtech jump, and then finish the day. I was a little nervous when Leighton told me that this plane was the response plan for Eastern Arctic and the Maritimes, plus a sizeable chunk of Atlantic Ocean, and could be sent anywhere in this area by the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, possibly for several days - and me without an overnight bag! Oh well, I thought, bash on and hope for the best. Here's the view out of the cockpit window over New Ross, Nova Scotia. That's Leighton in the co-pilot's seat. He and the two other pilots would regularly trade seats for training purposes. I was allowed to stand behind them as long as I stayed out of the way and didn't snarl the comms cord from my headseat with the others. You can see how bright it was - it got pleasantly warm in the cockpit. Here we are over the South Shore of Nova Scotia, off Lunenburg and Mahone Bay. We rendezvoused with a Coast Guard cutter to begin training for a rescue at sea. SARtechs at one of the two observation windows in the read fuselage of the plane watch for the target in the water. The target was an orange disk, 18 inches in diametre, with a flashing strobe in the middle, simulating a person in a floatation device. A very hard target to see in the middle of the ocean. THis was exactly the sort of work that most of this crew had been doing off Newfoundland during the search for the Cougar helicopter that went down off Hibernia. The tail gate of the Herc is opened, to allow a pump to be dropped to a boat in distress. Here the loadmaster supervises the drop and watches for the deployment of the parachute. Getting ready for the first drop. The gate goes down on the approach to Summerside. That's the Confederation Bridge linking Prince Edward Island to Nova Scotia. It was quite a contrast from the toasty cockpit back here at 3000 feet when the gate goes down! On the ground at Summerside - Leighton in front of Tusker 313. On the way home to Greenwood, crossing the Bay of Fundy at 6000 feet. Cape Split, that long curving neck of land, is clearly visible.