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Comely LUNENBURG , 10km south of Mahone Bay village, perches on a narrow bumpy peninsula, its older central streets, sloping steeply down to the southward-facing harbourfront, decorated by brightly painted wooden houses. Dating from the late nineteenth century, the most flamboyant of these mansions display an arresting variety of architectural features varying from Gothic towers and classic pillars to elegant verandas, high gables and peaked windows, all embellished with intricate scrollwork. Amidst the virtuousity, a distinctive municipal style is noticeable in the so-called "Lunenburg Bump", where overhanging window dormers are surmounted by triple-bell cast roofs - giving the town a vaguely European appearance appropriate to its original settlement. Lunenburg was founded in 1753 by German and Swiss Protestants, who of necessity soon learned to mix the farming of their homeland with fishing and shipbuilding. They created a prosperous community with its own fleet of trawlers and scallop-draggers, although nowadays the town earns as much from the tourist industry as from fishing. Lunenburg's pride and joy is its Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic (early May to late Oct daily 9.30am-5.30pm; late Oct to early May Mon-Fri 8.30am-4.30pm; $7), housed in an old fish-processing plant down by the quayside. It has an excellent aquarium, a room devoted to whales and whaling, and displays on fishing and boat-building techniques. Another section features the locally built 1920s schooner Bluenose and its replica Bluenose II , whilst the August Gales display has wondrous tales of mountainous seas and helmsmen tied to the mast to stop being swept overboard. Moored by the jetty, there's a trawler and a scalloper, but the real high spot here is the Theresa E. Connor , a saltbank fishing schooner launched in 1938. Superbly restored, the schooner was one of the last boats of its type to be built, a two-masted vessel constructed to a design that had changed little since the early eighteenth century: if you read Treasure Island as a child and were confused by the layout of the boat, all is revealed. The main change in schooner design came with the installation of engines in the early 1900s: the helmsman no longer needed to keep an eagle-eye on the sails and so he could be moved aft. Further protection was provided by a wheelhouse, though there were teething problems with these and initially an alarming number were lost at sea. With or without engines, fishing schooners worked in the same way: each carried several dories , small row boats that were launched at the fishing grounds. The men rowed the dories away from the schooner, fanning out to trail long hand-lines with baited hooks over the ocean - line-fishing. At the end of the day, the catch would be brought back to the schooner. Dory-fishing was a dangerous business - the transfer of the catch was especially risky and there was always the chance of being caught in the dory by a sudden squall. Not surprisingly, therefore, local fishermen did not need much persuading to abandon their schooners and dories for the larger trawlers that replaced them in the 1950s. The Theresa E. Connor soldiered on, but her last voyage was an ignominious failure: in 1963 she sailed out of Lunenburg bound for Newfoundland to raise the rest of her 25-man crew. No one turned up and the schooner had to return home empty-handed. There's more of maritime interest down along the harbourfront at the Dory Shop , where they make wooden boats in traditional style and hire out sail and row boats. If you haven't the confidence/experience to sail out on your own, regular boat trips leave the jetty near the museum throughout the summer. There are also two- to three-hour whale-watching trips operated daily during the summer by Lunenburg Whale Watching Tours (tel 527-7175).
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