Lunenburg - A Rich Traditional and Idyllic Harbor Town - A Town built by wooden #WoodenBoat #UNESCO

Nova Scotia is renowned for having 7,500 kilometers of rugged coastline, friendly people and rich farmland. Its history has been forged by a strong connection to the ocean and its residents draw upon their seafaring heritage while looking to the future. Nestled on the south shore of Nova Scotia, Lunenburg is a picturesque community that has maintained a strong connection to its rich maritime history. The town was founded in 1753 by European settlers who started farming the rich soil, but eventually they turned their attention to the sea. Already skilled carpenters and woodworkers, they learned the craft of wooden boat building and many became master shipwrights and fishermen. By the early 1900s, Lunenburg boasted an impressive fleet of several hundred schooners. It had become the fishing capital of Canada and one of the wealthiest towns per capita in the British Empire. By the 1970s, however, the landscape had changed dramatically. Sailing ships had given way to motorized vessels and wooden hulls were being replaced by fiberglass and steel. The art of wooden boat building was facing a grim future. On the far end of Lunenburg's waterfront is a boat shed that sat empty for the past 40 years, but all that changed recently. Master shipwright David Westergaard is carrying on the time-honored tradition of designing and building wooden boats. He's building a 20-meter wooden schooner. Building a wooden boat is very special to me, mainly because of the wood. Every part in a wooden boat is selected. Every piece is selected for its grain or its durability or its strength. David uses four species of wood, white oak, spruce, hackmatack, and Alaskan yellow cedar. The knees are made from the roots of the local hackmatack tree. The natural grown curves provide extra strength to the hull. For the intermediate frames, David steams oak. Open, close. Box, I'll get close right away. Yeah. You physically have to get into building the boat and twisting and bending and steaming. The schooner's launch date is only a year away, so the schedule is tight. David insists on building with top quality wood. The Alaskan yellow cedar came from the Pacific coast of Canada, 5,000 kilometers away. She's planked with two-inch yellow cedar, and it comes in very long lengths and it's clear, no knots or anything. You have to respect the wood, every piece. It's the difference between slow food and fast food. The building a wooden boat is slow. It's a process that you engage in it and you watch it grow, step in, you know, piece by piece by piece. Lunenburg is a bustling town with 2,300 year-round residents. It's the heart of Lunenburg County. Which covers an area of 2,900 square kilometers. A few kilometers from Lunenburg on fertile second peninsula is where Glenn Rodenizer's family farm can be found. Glenn can trace his family tree back 10 generations to the first German settlers in Lunenburg County. They grow cabbage on four hectares of their 80 hectare multi-purpose farm. The cabbage is used to make sauerkraut at their family-run business, Crispy Kraut. I like cabbage and sauerkraut cooked with brown sugar is probably one of my favorites. I don't know if you ever had it that way, but it is really good. Glenn's children help with the harvest and his father drives the tractor. One time we probably would have harvested 40 or 1,000 cabbage, but now we're probably up into about 90, so we'll probably go twice as much. They find the biggest cabbage to harvest. The larger the cabbage, the faster the sauerkraut making process. They clean the cabbage by cutting off its outer leaves. Glenn has three fields with 30,000 cabbages in each field. He rotates the crops each year to keep the soil healthy. Cabbage have short roots and are ideally suited to the local maritime climate, but the success of his crop is dependent on the weather. If you get a wet year, especially early, their roots will not form well. It's better to have a dry year early and damper way later. And then when it rains or fog from off the water, anything with drizzle like that, they just really grow well. You can see the nice great big leaves they have on them. And then you get big frames and you get a big frame, you get a big head. After they harvest the large cabbages, they search for the smaller ones. The Rodenizers have no shortage of cabbages or fun. Here it goes. Sign her up. The smaller cabbages are sold directly to local grocery stores and customers often use them to make their own sauerkraut. Sauerkraut recipes in Lumenberg County date back 260 years to the first German settlers. You pickled stuff, you salted stuff, and kraut was an important part of making it through your winter. Most settlers had their own secret sauerkraut recipes. 30 years ago, Glenn's father asked a retired sauerkraut maker if he would share his sauerkraut recipe, which many people felt was the best in the county. He finally agreed, but the Rodenizers were sworn to secrecy. The recipe was to stay in their family forever. It's a trade secret. How it's made and how it goes and certain things, but length of time and types of cabbage and things like that all affect the taste. So you want to keep that kind of close to your heart. Glenn delivers the cabbages to their sauerkraut processing plant eight kilometers from the family farm. Dad bought a piece of land and then we set the kraut plant up right there inside the road, Crispy Kraut. Me and my cousin Kevin at the kraut plant, we go back and forth. I'm here and he's there and dad. And so the three of us over the years have, you know, managed it in some way. Glenn and Kevin shred the cabbage into fine strips. They combine the shredded cabbage with salt and water and the mixture is left to ferment for three to six weeks, depending on the time of year. Of course, the South Shore in Nova Scotia is a stronger place for kraut sales. I think there's more people trying new stuff. And then when it came out that sauerkraut was a probiotic and very good for your gut. So it became, I think, even more popular on the health end because it's something that's actually very positive for your body. Although sauerkraut is not popular with everyone, those who like it, like it a lot. During the golden age of sale, sleek wooden schooners relied on rugged dories to bring in their catch. Today, dories play a different role. In Lunenburg's harbor, Donette Eden and her dory are a familiar sight. I like rowing in Lunenburg. Every time I jump in the dory and I take off out of the slipway, I look at Lunenburg. I see it differently every single time I go out. For the past five years, she and her rowing partner, Willie, row four times a week for a few hours a day. They're training for the international dory races. Last year, they won the co-ed race. This year, they'll defend their title. Dory rowing is synonymous with partnership, synchronized rowing, friendship and hard work. My partner, my dory mate, is the engine and I'm the wheel. As long as he can keep the speed up, I'll make sure I keep us going in the right direction. It takes an extreme amount of strength and skill to keep a 300 kilogram dory rowing straight. Dories, once essential to the fishery, were considered the workhorse of the Atlantic. She's colored this buff color to be seen on the water. With the green trim is to see her against the fog. She's a five to one ratio length to width, high sided, very stable boats and a pleasure to row. The upcoming race is a competition between Canadian and American dory teams. The international dory race started in 1952 after two fishermen, one from Lunenburg and the other from Gloucester, Massachusetts, placed a gentleman's bet on which fishing village had the best rowers. Six decades later, the race remains a fierce yet friendly competition between the two countries. With only a small boat and a rake, Ollie Cote heads out into the open ocean. He's looking for Irish moss, which is a type of seaweed. The ideal conditions for harvesting Irish moss are at low tide with very little wind. But that's one of my favorite spots is just around the corner here at the hounds. Good spot. Irish moss thrives in shallow rocky areas where the sea is active and the waves constantly move against the shore. So you spend a lot of time looking for little green patches below the water. They look like little spruce tree patches or something. Seven kilometers from Lunenburg, Ollie finds what he hopes is a good spot. But there's too much rockweed and not enough Irish moss. This is rockweed. We're not going for that. This is moss. That's what we're going for. That's Irish moss. On a good day, he can harvest about 500 kilograms. It's a great job because you might be surprised it pays pretty well when you're doing well. And you're your own boss. You explore the coastline. My favorite part is really just getting to know our coastlines really well. You're kind of like an explorer in a way, you know. You're always kind of just charting the coastline. With not a lot of luck so far today, he hopes this new location will be better. This is a good spot all in this side of Cross Island because primarily we have a southwest wind here and so I can rake most summer days on this side of Cross Island because it's in the lee. It's sheltered. So you can just even though it could be a windy day on the other side, this side is usually nice and calm and you can play in along these rocks. Explore and find all the moss you can handle in here, usually. The rake Ollie uses is a government-approved size. It's stainless steel with only five millimeters between the tines. If the spacing was tighter you would take all the roots of the plant with you and then it wouldn't regrow there so you couldn't rake the next year. It's a good spot here. That's a good good rake. The weather and sea conditions can change in a heartbeat so Ollie is always cautious. You're always thinking about all things that can go wrong and what could happen and so you kind of have to calculate the risks and that's why you have to pick the best days and try to make sure your boat's in decent shape. Carrageenan is extracted from the moss and used as the thickener for food and cosmetics. Irish moss is Nova Scotia's most commercially valuable seaweed. If you boil it, it turns into gelatin. The fact that it's seaweed totally disappears and it turns into like aloe or something like when you buy aloe vera in a bottle. It's totally liquid and slippery so all the gelatin properties come out. If you want to make a dollar doing this you have to work very hard and it's a labor-intensive job. Though Ollie wasn't able to harvest a full boatload, he considers it a successful day. The 250 kilograms he collected is worth about 300 dollars. That's a good day for me and my skiff. Blumenberg's rich history can be seen on every street corner. Its brightly painted wooden buildings have been safeguarded throughout the centuries by its Because of its authentically preserved architecture, in 1995 Blumenberg was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A chance visit brought Farley Blackman to Blumenberg 10 years ago. He fell in love with the town and bought a summer home. But that was just the beginning. During the past decade, he's restored more than a dozen historical buildings in the town. Well Blumenberg really is a multi-faceted community. You have the heritage buildings, you have the long history that over time continues to evolve. You have nature all around you and you have the great hospitality of the Canadian people. It's kind of a hard thing to replicate anywhere else in the world. With the World Heritage status, there are specific rules regarding what can be done to buildings. You really can't change the facade of a building so that's specifically the front facade. Inside, such as here, you can do whatever you want. The cultural hub of Blumenberg's colorful past was the Blumenberg Opera House. It was built by shipwrights in 1907. For six decades, the Opera House was home to theatre, cinema and music. But in the 1970s, the music stopped. The Opera House sat empty. During the next 40 years, it fell into disrepair. Then Farley Blackman came to the rescue. My mom was a ballerina on Broadway and my dad was an art director, production designer for Broadway, then TV and then film. So it's in my blood. Saving the Opera House, I think, just came naturally. Farley has been restoring the Opera House for a decade. He's revamping the three-story wooden building while staying true to its original design. I'd like to get this done next week sort of thing. Yeah, because they're going to set up before the 20th, right? So we've got to test everything. We're trying to set up. With musical acts already lined up to play, a decade of work may not be enough time to get the Opera House ready. Preserving heritage buildings has become his passion. But Farley believes the best way to safeguard their future is to make sure they serve an active role in the community. Certainly love heritage and history, love nature and love the arts. And those things all come together in a really nice package in Lunenburg. And heritage buildings allow you to exhibit or try to do things in an artistic manner. But within the confines of history. And it's exciting and it's fun. A few blocks from the Opera House, the excitement builds on the waterfront. It's race day. Teams from Canada and the United States are competing in the international Dory races. Danette wants to defend her co-ed title. I've been really worried this morning. All morning I've been just pins and needles. Under the bow of the famous schooner Blue Nose 2, Danette and Willie prepare for the race. So we've got about 10 minutes to get the boats ready. Put our seats in. Hopefully our pins all fit right. The course is a quarter mile down. Do a hopefully four stroke turn and then a quarter mile back. And hopefully we can do it under six minutes like we did last year. So it's a tough race. Danette and Willie are one of 16 teams competing. We've got an incoming tide. So we're going to be fighting against that. And then we've got a little breeze coming on to the wharf as well. So we're going to be fighting to stay off the wharf today. We've got to keep our head in the game here and we'll do okay. The team they're rowing against are tough competitors. Danette and Willie have to win this race or they'll be eliminated. So representing the season international champions one time, we have Willie Wells and Danette Eden. They are in lane two. Right on the inside. Okay, you ready? After months of training, it all comes down to the next 10 minutes. Okay, get the balls on the boat. Okay, we're good. You ready? The competing team dash out across the starting line. Danette and Willie lag behind. With Willie's height and Danette's long powerful strokes, they're a good team. But even the smallest mistake could cost them the race. The long strokes work best when they both lean back at the same time. Danette controls their direction by calling out orders to Willie. We can ride the waves. We're getting farther. They still have time to catch the other team. Danette and Willie round the flag, but they're losing ground. They pull hard, but they can't catch up. They cross the finish line seconds after the other team. Danette and Willie have been eliminated. They won't have an opportunity to regain the co-ed title until next year. That was tough. Waves got big and we kept catching the oars in the waves. The other team, they were just tracking beautifully. We were just fighting the waves. So we did the turn and we came around. We were trying to catch a wave this direction so we could ride the wave, but it was just off a little bit and we just couldn't ride the wave. So that's a nice strong team there that beat us. So congrats to the Blue Nose team. Yeah, they ran an excellent race. Though Danette is disappointed, she's not discouraged. Winning is a bonus. The heart of the Dory race is about camaraderie and goodwill. Yeah, we just couldn't pull it out, but that's okay. It was great. We love rowing in Lunenburg. It's awesome. You did a good job, partner. Thanks a lot. You did good. All right, let's go watch the race. All right, let's do it. In the summer, Lunenburg is one of Nova Scotia's most popular towns. Visitors continue through the autumn when the leaves start to match the colors of Lunenburg's vibrant wooden homes. It's during the cold North Atlantic winter that the tourist numbers drop. For Lunenburg's residents, however, winter is usually just another season. But this year was different. The weather was especially harsh with unusually low temperatures and more snow than usual. The weather created an unexpected delay for David and forced him to stop working on his wooden schooner until the weather improved. The wood stacked up in the yard was basically buried in snow, and so everything was wet and was frozen. The winter weather is perfect for Tristan Kelly's work. His draft horses, Belle and Jesse, move safely when the ground is frozen. Horse logging in Lunenburg County was once the foundation of the forest industry. A horse is very flexible, so it gives you the options. It's a tool to harvest the trees that you want to, and the horse you can go in and they can zigzag through the woods. Tristan logs a few times a year. He removes certain trees so that the forest can regenerate. Mostly looking for deterioration. Is it detrimental to a better tree that's close to it or does it have a defect? So does it have a fork that's going to break off in a nice storm? Has a porcupine chewed it? So you're going to remove it so that a better quality tree can grow. While Tristan puts on his protective clothing to cut trees, Belle and Jesse load up on fuel so they have enough energy for a hard day's work. I don't know what takes longer to get the horses ready or me ready. All right, let's get on this trail. The Acadian forest is a mix of coniferous and deciduous trees that's unique to this part of the world. So by taking this tree out, it's going to let light come down, and beside it is a big pine which will probably live, although I see it's bleeding a little bit, for quite a long time. Tristan saws the trees into three meter logs to make it easier for his horses to pull. He chooses only one horse to pull the logs. Today it will be Belle. She's about eight or nine years old and she's worked in the woods a bit. She hasn't worked in the woods a whole lot. She's pretty level-headed most days, but she has a streak. Whoa, whoa. Tristan secures the logs to Belle with a harness. Horse logging is an environmentally friendly way to manage the forest. Horses don't need diesel fuel to operate, and Belle does less damage to the small trees and the soil. Unlike large logging machinery. When you're working all day, every day with a horse, there's definitely, there's a working relationship between you and the animal, which you don't get if you use machinery. Belle wasn't necessarily that easy to start. Over her working career, she got better and I really enjoy using her. She's one of my more favorite horses. When Belle and Tristan get into a rhythm, it's like watching a sports team that's played together for years. They know their roles and trust each other to navigate safely through the forest. They stack the wood at the side of the logging road, where it's easy for a tractor to pick them up. There used to be dozens of horse loggers in Lunenburg County. Now Tristan is among only a few that remain. It's just not economically feasible to do as something to make a living. Even though this rich culture of horse logging is dwindling, Tristan is determined to keep the tradition alive. This is not something that you easily come into late in life. This is something that you're usually born into. Not necessarily, like you can certainly learn it, but it's a skill set that takes a long time to learn and a lifestyle more than a skill set. As winter melts into spring, the launch date for the new schooner is only a few months away. When David and his crew get back to work, they don't take shortcuts. Certain jobs require hand tools rather than powered ones. Traditional would mean using the same materials and methods that have been used since time immemorial. It takes much more of an effort to build a boat and therefore you're more engaged in the boat. You have more empathy and you put more heart and soul into the boat. I just want to finish getting a good mark on here because I only saw it one time. I like to work with wood because wood is clean, it smells good, it feels good. You know, you can take it to any degree of finish you want or you can, you know, it's strong, it's durable. And when it's done, it's organic. To make the deck watertight, the seams are filled with cotton and sealed with a rubber-like compound. The bowsprit is crafted out of a piece of local spruce that's five meters long and weighs 125 kilos. It's lifted to the schooner's bow and will be fastened to the deck using large bolts. The ship's wheel, which will move the schooner's rudder, is lowered into place on deck. Yeah, it's only, it's five degrees off. Right, yeah. One, two, three. David wants to share the art of traditional boat building with the next generation. It's very important to me. Not that I have a, you know, I'm great at passing it on but I think built traditionally, a nice organic boat like this is very important. You marry the wood with each corresponding piece and the metal, the copper or the metal you're fascinated with and the oil and finish you put on the wood. It's, you can put as much finish or as little finish on it as you want and the boat, after its time, goes back to the earth to renew, re-fertilize the next trees to grow. In the springtime, when the soil begins to thaw and the air is crisp, the Rodenizers seed thousands of cabbage plants for the next batch of sauerkraut. For the Rodenizers, farming is a family affair. Glenn's parents own the farm and Glenn lives just down the lane with his wife and six children. His father taught him how to farm and his children help out whenever they can. Right now, two of them are working a lot on the farm so it's a big help because the farm's gotten a lot larger. We have more quota, more cows and more cabbage and sauerkraut and, you know, some get older and you can't do as much as you could before so you bring the young ones on and they can make up for that. The cabbage seedlings are kept in a greenhouse until they grow to a certain height. We have a couple different kinds of plants, probably about a dozen altogether and there's different maturities. There's some that are 70 days and there's some that are 110 days. The plants mature into cabbages at different rates so at harvest time, Glenn and his family can continuously pick the cabbage crop. When the weather allows, the cabbage plants are taken out of the greenhouse to harden off. If Glenn tries to plant them in the field when they're too green and before they're hardened off, they'll break. You want to get the cabbage to this point and this is almost there where they have a nice... they're getting hard and you can probably see that it's getting purple and you want them to be able to pull out. It comes out and you have a... that's the root ball down there. You have a hard stem that you can pull it out with and you want this as much white as you can and that way you can take it and put it in the planter, it goes in the ground and it doesn't fall apart. So then when the time comes, you just pull them out of their cells and you put them in the planter and the planter got a little carousel that goes around and it drops them into the ground and that's how it's done. After a decade of work, the Lunenberg Opera House is ready for its grand reopening. We're about half an hour from opening the doors to the public, which is good. We're very close to a sellout, maybe 20 tickets left. There's a lot of energy in short for the opera house, a lot of passion for it. The inaugural performance is the award-winning Atlantic Canadian singer-songwriter Lenny Galan. It's quite emotional. This has been a 10-year, $2 million effort. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be here playing in this amazing, wonderful, refurbished theater. Very great honor to be here. It's been a manic effort here the past couple of months to get ready. We're ready to go. Music in the opera house after 10 years. I'm going in. Lunenberg County's coastline is teeming with a wide variety of marine life. As the weather warms, turtles, whales, sharks, and other species migrate to these waters to feed. But a few kilometers from Lunenberg, a sea creature is in trouble. Andrew Reid responds to emergency calls when a marine animal is in distress. When's the last time you saw? About 40 minutes ago. Okay, is this in the Kingsburg area? It is. It should just be down the beach to the right. He gathers information from the German tourists who first spotted the animal. At first we thought it was a bird or something because it was just black in the water. And then I saw the flippers and I thought it was a dolphin or something like that. They tell Andrew that it keeps swimming to the beach, which is not a good sign. Andrew identifies the animal. This is actually, looks like a baby pilot whale. You can see the dorsal fin has quite a bit of a hook to it. He puts on his wetsuit and prepares to jump into the surf with the animal. I'm just going to try and hold it out in deeper water for a while. When a whale is stranded, they lose their sense of balance and lean to one side. They start to swim in circles, which often leads them towards the shore. Andrew holds the baby whale upright to try and help it regain its balance. He definitely still can't maintain his balance. Part of that could be if he was stranded on shore. When I let him go, he still keeps on coming back ashore. Andrew listens for pilot whale calls, but he hears none. Pilot whales are social animals and travel in groups. It's unusual to see an adult on its own, let alone a baby. After hours of trying to help the whale regain its balance, its condition is not improving. When Andrew lets the whale go, it swims back towards the shoreline. It was twitching a lot, a lot of tremoring, and its family wasn't around anymore. The whale exhibits abnormal behavior. This could be more serious than needing to regain its balance. It may have a respiratory issue. Something besides being too young to survive on its own, there was something else abnormal about its behavior, whether it had some kind of sickness, but there was definitely something wrong with it. Despite Andrew's best efforts, the pilot whale has been separated from its mother too long. It's not strong enough to survive. Last year's Dory race results don't dampen Danette's spirit or her desire to compete. When she's not pounding the waves, she makes bags from recycled materials. I've been making hats, actually, since I was a young girl, out of reclaimed materials. And then I morphed that into making bags from reclaimed materials, sails, conveyor belts, vinyls, nylons, leathers. If I can get my hands on the material, I will turn it into a bag. Danette found her passion in Lunenburg in her sewing room and on the water in her Dory. She may not have been able to defend her title, but as soon as the weather allows, she's back on the water, getting ready for the upcoming season. It'd be great to win every time I race, but it's not about the win. It's about the training and leading up to the race and just being in this harbor and rowing with my Dory mate, Will. He's a great mate, and yeah, we have a lot of fun rowing. There's Mom. And Mom goes on the right. All right. I do love what I do. I love to row. I love to sew. I love this town. I love the harbor. I love life. It's easy to romanticize Lunenburg's golden age of sail, but David doesn't just dream about it. He keeps the tradition alive. After 5,000 hours of work, the wooden schooner is ready to launch. A good boat is full of heart and soul and the work you put into it. The boat needs to go into the water on a rising tide, so there's no time to waste. David checks the cradle to make sure it's level. If it's not perfect, the schooner could fall to one side as it launches. A lot of things could go wrong. It's not easy sending a 32-ton vessel down a wooden slickway into the ocean. You only get one chance. Yeah, it's just like all eyes are on you and it's just like, you know, if something screws up, well, you know, any slight, you know, miscalculation, they're all going to look at me, right? The launch of a new vessel is cause for celebration. Residents gather to witness this historic event. The boat is christened with the name Mahayana, which means the great vehicle. The cradle is tied to a powerful motorboat to help pull the schooner far enough out into the water to ensure that it floats. David and his crew use a hydraulic jack to get the schooner moving. Suddenly it's in the water. I mean, it's like, that's what it's all about. And, you know, it didn't sink or leak or, you know, so it went to its natural environment. When it hit the water, it's home. The residents of Lunenburg aren't just honoring the town's rich maritime history. They're also embracing its future. It's a testament to the resiliency of proud people whose traditions and way of life aren't just surviving, they're thriving.