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The ferry docked at the little harbour at Ingalls Head, and it was one of those fun crossings, where you park your bike against the rail, lean over the edge, and enjoy the view and the feel of the water rushing by. And as a bonus, it was free.

The road stopped at Gull Cove on the east coast and we then pushed our bikes across a flat isthmus and sat on a nice deserted shingle beach to eat our lunch as we watched the cormorants drying themselves on the rocks just offshore. We continued on, heading down some gravel tracks and narrow paths, but couldn’t get anywhere we felt was taking us further round the island—just the odd cleared spot where junk had been dumped in the woods. We accepted failure on that little quest, retraced our path back to the ferry landing, and continued on as far as we could, this time in an anti-clockwise direction.

This took us to Battle Beach, a shallow bay on the south of the island and we set our sights on getting to the Long Point lighthouse that marked the far end of the bay. Our road changed to a track, then a path and eventually we were struggling to push our bikes through foot-deep seaweed along the back of the beach.

We were determined to come as close as possible to completing the circuit of the island. The whole beach had a very thick layer of the seaweed, probably the result of the strong winds and waves of the tail end of hurricane Irene which had passed through a couple of nights before—but this allowed numerous shorebirds to enjoy harvesting the small creatures on the seaweed. From Long Point we could see the high cliffs of Southwest Head on Grand Manan to the west, and the lighthouse on Gannet Rock 8 away on the southern horizon.

As we returned to the ferry we took a detour and found the white quartzite headland that the island is named for, and had a fun time scrambling over the smooth, bare rocks.

As we approached Ingalls Head on our return trip we passed a derelict lighthouse on the rocky tip of Ross Island. This lighthouse was built in 1879 to mark the entrance to Grand Harbour, and operated until 1963. After that the combination of severe weather and high tides over the years slowly tore it apart, and it finally completely collapsed during a gale in November 2013, two years after we passed by and took this photo. The Maritimes are full of small picturesque, white painted wooden lighthouses. It’s sad to see how easily a few years of neglect can wipe them out.

We'd had a fun, pleasant day—nothing outstanding, just a relaxing way of soaking up the maritime environment. When we got back to the mainland at Ingalls Head (well, by then Grand Manan Island seemed like the mainland) men were unloading seaweed at the wharf from a small boat that had been out harvesting it. Before leaving Grand Manan we sought out a place where they dried and sold a number of varieties of seaweed and bought some to take home and experiment with in our cooking.