Southwestern N.S. buoy makes year-long transatlantic journey to Ireland

By Eric Bourque

FOR THE SOU'WESTER

NovaNewsNow.com

A piece of southwestern Nova Scotia’s fishing industry washed ashore in Ireland recently after a transatlantic journey that apparently took almost a year.

Brenda LaGrandeur, tourism development officer for the Municipality of Argyle in southwestern Nova Scotia, received an email from overseas from Don Cotton, who said he found a mooring buoy identified as belonging to the Scotia Swan of Wedgeport on a sandy beach in County Sligo in northwestern Ireland.

In that initial email message Cotton said he is “a scientist and naturalist interested in debris from the sea” and that he wanted to learn where and when the buoy had been lost. “As an environmentalist I find it important and exciting to realize how we are linked by the sea between Canada and Ireland,” he told LaGrandeur, whose address he had found on a Municipality of Argyle Internet site.

She found out for him that the Scotia Swan, a Wedgeport fishing vessel, had lost the buoy in question in January of 2007.

While someone finding a buoy from Nova Scotia on an Irish beach might not seem like much of a big deal – an interesting story perhaps but little more – Cotton suggests the discovery may be more significant than it might seem when considered as part of a broader picture. “The knowledge gained from this buoy is a valuable piece of scientific data because it is another piece in the global jigsaw of how our planet works,” he said in another email to LaGrandeur. “It further proves a link between ocean currents and the way the wind blows between North America and Europe, and in particular links the southern tip of Nova Scotia with northwest Ireland. I find that very exciting.”

Cotton, who said he hasn’t been to Canada since 1972 – when he was in British Columbia and the Yukon working on a research project – recalled the time about 20 years ago when he found a plastic bottle with a message in it that had made it across the Atlantic from St. John’s. He was later informed by an oceanography professor that the bottle was considered the fastest object to cross the Atlantic with no assistance, with just wind and water currents to push it along. “I am afraid the buoy comes nowhere close to that record,” he said. “Nevertheless it is an interesting find.”