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The Bay of Fundy has the world’s highest tides. Just roll with it.

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
A GOOD TIDE WAS HAD BY ALL: Visitors walk on the ocean floor at low tide at Burntcoat Head Park, the site of the world’s highest recorded tides from the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia.

| Lower Truro, Nova Scotia

It happens twice a day, every day, and has for thousands of years. But watching the world’s highest tides arrive and recede in the Bay of Fundy never gets old.

At the head, the tide can rise about as tall as a four-story building. Photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman and I drove to Burntcoat Head Park in Nova Scotia, where visitors can walk onto the ocean floor when the tide is out and return hours later to see it disappear under the 160 billion metric tons of water that flow into and out of the bay each day.

At the Fundy Discovery Site, tourists can witness a tidal bore, or a wave that moves upstream in a river. The times for the day’s bores are listed outside the visitor center, but on this mid-September day, birds began flocking around the banks of the Salmon River, announcing the bore’s arrival. “It’s like the cavalry coming up over the hill,” says Nancy Wood, visiting with her husband, Leonard, from North Carolina.

Within 15 minutes, the bore rolled in, covering the riverbed upon which the birds had been happily perched at low tide. “You don’t see this every day,” says Mr. Wood. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
HIGH-WATER MARK: The Flower Pot Rocks site is surrounded by water at high tide.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
FLOORED: A boat sits on the ocean floor at low tide in Parkers Cove. At high tide, the boat will be level with the pier.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
TIDAL SHOWER: A tidal bore pushes upstream on the Salmon River at Fundy Discovery Site. Bores occur twice daily as water rushes in from the Bay of Fundy.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
GOING WITH THE EBB AND FLOW: Leonard and Nancy Wood (from left), visiting from North Carolina, and their friend Terri Myser, of Ohio, watch a tidal bore on the Salmon River.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
HAVING THE TIDE OF THEIR LIFE: A family walks on the ocean floor at low tide at Burntcoat Head Park. It is safest to be on the ocean floor three hours before low tide and three hours after.

For more visual storytelling that captures communities, traditions, and cultures around the globe, visit The World in Pictures.

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