Deck log: seven minutes across Petit Passage

Written in a motel in Digby, Wednesday night, 4 November.

The crossing from East Ferry to Tiverton takes seven minutes. We rode it eleven times today, which is a personal record and, Inés would like it noted, a personal record for not being sick.

The deckhand is Marcel LeBlanc, twenty-six, third generation on this passage. He waves cars on with a flashlight even at noon, because his grandfather did and because, he says, "drivers obey a light, they argue with a hand." On our fourth run a woman in a blue Corolla handed him a foil tray of date squares through the window. On the sixth he handed one to us.

The tide in the passage runs hard enough that the boat crabs sideways the whole way over. Cal put a contact mic on the hull and got what he calls "the sound of a ferry disagreeing with the Bay of Fundy." It may open the episode.

Tomorrow: the 07:15 to Freeport and, if Marcel's uncle answers his phone, the Brier Island boat.

— I. & C.