Seeing a line of surfboards stacked against parked cars on Cow Bay Rd., while surfers cling to the roadside in a scramble to pull on their wetsuits, is something most locals are used to. The surfing community has been trespassing through Cow Bay residents’ yards for years to ride one of Atlantic Canada’s few world class waves—a surf break called “Minutes.” But now surfers and the rest of the Cow Bay community have a beach to call their own. A report from a closed session of city council reveals that the municipality agreed to spend just over $211,000 for a 9.2 acre beachside property with 1,000 feet of ocean frontage. Read the full report here.
“We have an obligation as a government to ensure that we provide coastal access to the public and there’s not enough of it left, so we have to take our opportunities where we can get them,” says Cow Bay Councillor Jackie Barkhouse. The land purchase was also instigated by environmental concerns: the previous property owner, Edward Jakeman, had been infilling ecologically sensitive marshland in hopes of developing it. “If we as a municipality purchased this wetland, we could ensure that it was preserved and looked after,” says Barkhouse.
The Coastal Access Committee, a non-profit organization working to secure public access to Nova Scotia’s coastlines, spent three and a half years lobbying the municipality to create a public beach. The beach is a favourite spot of local surfer and Committee co-chair Iaian Archibald. “We’ve had surfers from B.C., Hawaii and California come here and surf Minutes and be blown away by the quality of the waves,” he says. The waves have drawn international surfing competitions to Cow Bay, such as Red Bull’s Ice Break competition, hosted with the permission of the 2004 land owner Alan Gosley.
Archibald explains that there are three kinds of surf breaks: beach, reef and cobblestone break. “Minutes is a little special because it’s a combination of a reef and cobblestone, which is part of the reason that it’s got such good shape,” he says. “Its nickname is ‘Minutes’ because the joke is that you can ride a wave for minutes. It just keeps on going and going and going.”
HRM project manager Blair Blakeney says the city will present plans for a boardwalk and parking lot to Cow Bay residents and get feedback from the community, in an open meeting May 27. Construction of the boardwalk is likely to begin this July. Blakeney guesses the project could cost up to $70,000 and says an anonymous donor will likely fund a significant portion of the project, provided it’s accepted by the Cow Bay community first. The Coastal Access Committee is raising funds for the boardwalk by asking for donations of $100 in exchange for having your name engraved on a board (see here for details.) Ideally, the boardwalk would provide access to both Minutes and the neighbouring beach Backyards, says Sean Kelly, the Committee’s other co-chair.
Kelly says the park is not just for the surfing community and should attract paddlers, bird watchers and naturalists as well. The Ecology Action Centre and the Environment Committee of Canoe Kayak wrote letters expressing their official support for the development of a public park. Councillor Barkhouse hopes a boardwalk would provide “an opportunity for the young people to go in there and ride their bikes and roller-blade, because there are no sidewalks in that area.”
Sport Nova Scotia gave the Surfing Association of Nova Scotia full membership earlier this year and the sport continues to explode in popularity. The Coastal Access Committee estimates there are over 1,000 year-round surfers and thousands more seasonally. A small community of surfers have even started moving to Cow Bay just for the surf. The creation of a public beach “is in part the city recognizing how big the sport has become and how much of a part of Nova Scotia’s identity it’s becoming,” says Archibald happily.
This article appears in May 13-19, 2010.
“Kelly says the park is not just for the surfing community and should attract paddlers, bird watchers and naturalists as well.”
Bird watchers and noodists?
Count me in!
It’s a bit disturbing that at least one member of one level of government thinks that the only way of preventing Jakeman’s infilling was simply to buy up the property, or that Jakeman was blithely infilling in the hopes of developing that marshland. Quite bluntly, WTF? Do the environmental assessment regulations under the Environment Act not apply here, where any undertaking which disrupts 2 or more hectares of wetland needs an EA?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased that the municipality bought the property. But it shouldn’t have required that action to cause Jakeman to cease and desist. It’s worrisome – and unfortunately way too common across the province – that property owners ignore the regulations and governments are either ignorant or turn a blind eye.
Coastline acquisition is not a municipal responsibility. This is just another example of rampant HRM overspending.
I think this is GREAT! I don’t surf or bird watch but feel that HRM buying this land contributes to the ability for Halifax and Nova Scotia to attract more people to live here. This is something unique about where we live and I am, for once, pleased with council’s decision.
Bo, parks & recreation *is* a municipal responsibility. It also happens to be a provincial and federal responsibility. I have no idea how the three levels decide how to divvy things up, but the acquisition of this particular land and its conversion into a park seems to be a reasonable thing for HRM to do.
You may complain about $300k (property + boardwalk) for this particular project. Me, if I’m looking at municipal waste, I’m not so happy about the new 4-pad arena out in Hammonds Plains, which is over a hundred times as costly. The little park/access point at Cow Bay will handle thousands of visitors a year for very low operations costs; the 4-pad arena is going to generate sweet profit for Nustadia and suck up taxpayer money for decades.
I gotta agree with ‘Realist in Dartmouth’ That 4 pad hockey arena is going to be monopolised by team hockey, & unless the ice rental’s are running full out, that’s just going to be another drain on the public purse (which we have to keep filled !)
Having a bit of waterfront, where you can actually access the water sounds like a good deal to me.
Just to clarify a few points being made in this piece, I have lived in Cow Bay my entire life, and Edward Jakeman is my grandfather. The land that has been purchased by the government was originally owned by my great, great, grandfather who, as one of the first men to settle in Cow Bay farmed over a very large portion of land which included the land in question. Over the past decades the farm land has been split up and passed on to family members, and the lot featured in this article was left to my grandfather. It is true that he wanted to sub divide the land, not to develop, but in order to leave a plot to each of his children and grandchildren. Also, it’s important you know that the only fill that was ever brought onto that lot was done over the first 30 feet of property, well before the marshland begins. It was done so that if the city agreed to allow him to divide the lot there would be access to it from the road. So, “Realist in Dartmouth” there were no regulations ignored and the land was not purchased so my grandfather would “cease and desist” it was purchased because an offer was made and he accepted it in order to supplement his pension and live more comfortably rather then have a 9 acre property that cannot be built upon or divided among our family. So I can assure all of you that my 74 year old grandfather is no profit mongering land developer looking to destroy an ecologically sensitive marshland to develop and sell off piece by piece for profit.