Six Days in Nova Scotia

No waves, double doubles, long drives, fish and chips, dart games, tent naps, roaming charges, great people and concrete bowls. We spent six surfless days in Nova Scotia.

“I heard it gets really good up there”, growing up as a surfer in New England this is a phrase you hear a lot about waves in Nova Scotia. Everyone agrees, they have heard stories second hand or seen a photo in a mag but that’s it. No first hand experience or insight, just across the board agreement that Nova Scotia can get good waves, or so they have heard. So after years of talking about it, a friend and I decided to put it all on red, we blocked out a week in September, packed up the car and hoped for the best.

Driving to Nova Scotia from Boston takes the same amount of time as flying to Hawaii out of Logan. We didn’t know that going into it, honestly for a trip we had talked about taking for over a decade, we didn’t know much at all. We didn’t know Nova Scotia is in a different time zone, we had a very weak grasp on the metric system and we had no idea what the exchange rate was on money. So basically we were headed to Canada in the search of waves with no idea what time it was, how far it was or what anything cost, let alone where waves were.

Finding waves wouldn’t be an issue, there wasn’t any, anywhere. We got skunked. After spending a day short of a week up there, I can only report back the same as everyone else, “I heard it gets good”. While we got no waves up north, I’m not complaining. We spent our days drinking Timmy Horton’s, hiking and skating unreal bowls that are sprinkled throughout Nova Scotia. We met strangers who let us put up tents in their yards and then those strangers became friends. We spent hours looking at rocky coastlines and talking about their potential (pointential?) and imagining how perfect it must get with the right swell. Nova Scotia is a trip we will keep taking. We will keep going till we score and when I do, mums the word. Nova Scotia was one of the best trips I’ve ever taken. The people we met and the hospitality we were shown was next level, on leaving we agreed that if we are going to get skunked, Nova Scotia is a pretty unreal spot to do it.

Hayden Brosnan

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