This week gets off to an unusually quiet start in the harbour. But that’s a fitting way to honour the weekend’s anniversary of a massive shipwreck in the North Atlantic. The doomed vessel was a proud steamship of the White Star Line, sailing from England to New York, and when it went down taking hundreds […]
Harbour Traffic Report
Posted inNews + Opinion
One behemoth of a ship arrives in Halifax Harbour this week
Do you remember the first time you watched Star Wars? There’s a moment right at the beginning of Episode IV: A New Hope that fundamentally changed my understanding of scale and shattered any imagined limits of just how utterly enormous a thing could be. I’ll describe it for you if you’re unfamiliar: The scene opens […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Marvel comics meets Shakespearean tragedy in Halifax Harbour this week
As a rule, I loathe emails and would spend a fortune to never read another. But there are exceptions: Coast readers are a wonderful bunch, and I’ve been nothing short of delighted with many of the correspondences I’ve had with them. This past week was no different. One reader, Al, wrote in about our weekly […]
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A long-awaited meteor and a Greek philosopher meet in Halifax Harbour this week
The last significant meteor showers to grace the Atlantic Canadian skies came at the end of 2022 with the Geminids, which peak annually in mid-December. The next sighting should be far easier to spot, if less spectacular: The 55,534-tonne NYK Meteor container ship arrived in Halifax from Caucedo, Dominican Republic at the start of the […]
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A boatload of oil and one terrible name is bound for Halifax Harbour this week
Changing a thing’s name comes with one simple rule: No matter the domain—ships, stadiums, stage names, sports teams—you have to make sure that whatever new name you’ve chosen is better than the one that came before it. A name change can be good (think Washington or Cleveland’s sports teams ditching their racist mascots), kinda-confusing-but-cool (Prince […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
A bullfighter and a politician meet in Halifax Harbour this week. Sort of.
One of Halifax’s greatest strange-but-true elements of local lore is that, somewhere at the bottom of the Bedford Basin, there are about 20 to 30 Volvos sitting on the harbour floor. There’s a lengthier story to be told about how they got there—one that Jalopnik’s Máté Petrány gets into here—but the short (and unconfirmed) version […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
A giant load of cars and one big friggin’ ship is coming to Halifax Harbour
There’s an old adage that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. My coastal colleague, Zoë Ducklow, has been following the offshore comings and goings of vessels near Victoria, BC in her twice-weekly Westshore newsletter for months. It’s a fun glimpse at what’s happening in the Pacific Northwest’s waters—and, well, I figured: Why not here, […]