Tide Flats at Dusk (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

26 August finds us in Walton, Nova Scotia, at the mouth of the Walton River, on the Minas Basin, the place of the world's highest recorded tides.

The tide is going out now and will soon be at its lowest, and it's threatening rain.  I've set Fred up to skin the Gannets that he found at Cap Lumiere for the New Brunswick Museum, and Adam has gone to explore the tide flats for clams.

At low tide the sea goes out for more than a kilometre here, leaving a vast and fascinating landscape of channels in shining clay, and wandering bars of mixed clay, sand, and gravel - all the way out to a thin line of open water at the horizon.

I am sitting on a flat rock at the edge of a shale bluff, and directly across the river, at the top of a sloping gravel shore and against the forest, a family is camping with a cluster of bright nylon tents.  This afternoon they were fishing from the tip of the headland and exploring the receding tide line.

We are parked on the town side of the river, by a pair of large concrete silos in which we are told barite ore is only occasionally stored now, since the most productive barite mine in Canada was shut down about 25 years ago because they couldn't keep salt water from flooding it. The old wharf juts in from the right of my painting, and beyond it is the breakwater.