Beloved beach and park at P.E.I.'s Basin Head voted one of Canada's best 10 vacation spots
A listener-led CBC Radio effort has put the P.E.I. provincial park in the spotlight
When Ottawa resident Lana Gauthier visited P.E.I. last summer with her family, she was told she had to check out the beach at Basin Head Provincial Park.
"We went on a Monday, and we loved it so much, we went again on the Friday," Gauthier told CBC's Island Morning.
"We tracked the tide, so we knew the tides would be high on the Monday and low on the Friday. And each time was totally different."
Gauthier was so taken with the park that she recommended it to CBC's The Current, which was building a Canadian travel guide based on listeners' recommendations. More than 2,000 suggestions poured in from across the country.
With nearly 50,000 votes, Basin Head landed on the list of the top 10 destinations.
For Gauthier, one of the beach's most unique features is its Singing Sands — a nickname based on the high silica content in the sand, which makes the beach squeak when you walk on it.
"Even just the fact that the sand makes noise when you step on it is just, in itself, an amazing thing. We sat on the sandbars and just let the waves touch us. The water was so warm," she said.
"We looked for rocks. We walked along an expansive stretch of beach, and we saw the shipwreck with crabs on it. Our dog got to swim in the ocean at Basin Head. We took great family photos with the red cliffs behind us. We got ice cream."
More than just a beach
The park is also home to the Basin Head Fisheries Museum, which shares the story of P.E.I.'s inshore fishing industry. The museum includes the original building of a historic fish cannery and has displays and exhibits that bring the past to life.
Matthew McRae, executive director of the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation, said the museum is the second-most visited in the foundation's network of seven sites.
Together with its gift shop, it draws more than 20,000 visitors each year, out of the 60,000 to 70,000 who visit the provincial park every summer, he said.
McRae said the foundation is working with federal and provincial governments on a new interpretive plan that will tell a more comprehensive story of the site.
"The Basin Head museum is 50 years old now, so how do we tell the story — since a lot has happened in 50 years, to the fisheries, to Basin Head, to everything?" he said.
"We want to make sure that we're linking up those different stories, the Singing Sands, the beach, the cannery that is down there on the waterfront, which was an operating cannery in the 20th century."
A crucial part of that story is the park's marine protected area — one of only 14 in Canada, and one of the few accessible by land.
"It has a unique ecosystem that doesn't exist anywhere else on P.E.I. or the world, and that includes a special species of Irish moss that's only found in the basin at Basin Head," McRae said.
As part of the new interpretive plan, the foundation has worked with several partners, including the Souris and Area Branch of the P.E.I. Wildlife Federation, the P.E.I. Fishermen's Association, and members of P.E.I.'s Indigenous communities.
"We're just in the stages of preparing that interpretive plan report that we'll hopefully use then to start making changes to the site," McRae said.
This summer, the museum will offer special guided tours that take visitors from the basin to the beach to the museum. The Mi'kmaq Heritage Actors will also return to perform.
With files from Island Morning