By Andrew Macdonald
The Halifax International Boat Show, the largest boat show in the region, is underway at the Halifax Exhibition Centre.
It’s always exciting for boat owners and would-be boat owners to gather in the depths of winter to celebrate all things related to power boats and sailboats. The show opened Thursday and wraps up tomorrow, Sunday..
At this time of year, the boat show is a welcome promise of spring.
T.S. Elliott once wrote April is the cruelest month, but he got it wrong because the dreary depths of February have got to be the worst month of the year.
The annual boat show in the property that used to be known as Exhibition Park has traditionally been the official start of the kick-off boating season when folk buy boats, order sails to be repaired, and start buying toys for their vessels.
In recent years, the Nova Scotia government sold the park to developers Norman Nahas and Besim Halef – who rebranded it as Halifax Exhibition Centre. The popular boat show has typically brought boaters and sailors from across the Maritimes.
To understand the popularity of the show, in 2020 I spoke to sailing enthusiast Sandy MacMillan, who runs North Sails, the prominent marine and sail-making business in historic Lunenburg. In previous years, MacMillan manned a large booth at the boat show.
Traditionally, the local boat show over a weekend would usually attract up to 8,000 boating enthusiasts. MacMillan remembers way back when the show was held in the Halifax Forum and Ross MacDonald was the show promoter in that distant era.
Chester boat names are charming. This boat is called Single Malt. The Notebook photo
I remember my first time going to the show as a grade 8 student in 1982. That year it was held at the Metro Centre.
MacMillan tells The Macdonald Notebook that mega boat purchases often take place at the weekend-long event.
“There’s a couple of types of people who go to the boat show,” he adds. “There are the dreamers who go there and look and see what is new. There are guys who are in the boating cohort right now who might be interested in a new boat, and there is always folk moving laterally from sail to power.
Chester’s pub and eatery, The 200-year-old Rope Loft has a marina for boaters to dock while getting some fare or a drink. Piers Baker photo
“People move from sail to power when they get a little bit older, and circumstances change,” he tells The Macdonald Notebook. “Power is still the overwhelming driver at any boat show. There are more powerboats than sailboats on display.”
In 2017, boat show event host Master Promotions, headquartered in New Brunswick, inked a five-year deal with Nahas and Halef to continue hosting the marine show at Halifax Exhibition Centre. That turned out to be a major coup because Joe Ramia’s convention centre at Nova Centre in downtown Halifax can also easily handle the show, where large sailboats and powerboats are displayed, along with supplier booths.
Nova Centre opened in 2018.
In Nova Scotia in contemporary times, more boating enthusiasts are turning to power boats, MacMillan tells The Macdonald Notebook. Many top Halifax biz folk boat are among the power boaters. Commercial broker Bob Mussett has a Scout powerboat after selling his Boston Whaler in recent years, while apartment landlord Phillip Fraser has a Boston Whaler on the South Shore.
Norman Nahas is co-owner of the Halifax Exhibition Centre. He is pictured with the legendary, Bill Mont. Mont is the active collector, who even owns Devil’s Island. Notebook file photo
Another leading apartment developer Jim Spatz also boats.
Second-generation developer Maurice Fares in recent years sold his speed boat, which he had kept in St. Margaret’s Bay, while prominent Halifax undertaker Donald K. Walker prefers a sailboat to chop around the Nova Scotia coastline.
MacMillan sails out of the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron aboard a 42-foot vessel that is actually owned by his wife, Janet, a seasoned PR guru at National PR, which has a Halifax office.
MacMillan has also sailed in the famed Bras d’Or Lake in Cape Breton, once a boating mecca that attracted Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone from his estate on a hill perched over Baddeck.
MacMillan was also fond of sailing out of Dundee. Lamentably, the popular marina was in recent years converted to a private residential mansion. Former cabinet minister Billy Joe MacLean also used to boat out of that marina, near the legendary Dundee Golf & Country Club.
In the 1980s, the Dundee Marina, pictured, was a beehive of boating activity.
At one time Boston Whaler was the workhorse power boat in Nova Scotia, particularly in the waters of Mahone Bay. That changed after Rebok bought out Boston Whaler in recent years, and then laid off middle management folk who went on to invent new boats, such as Scout, offering direct competition.
“They all started new boat companies and all of a sudden the market got just as hell tough for Boston Whaler. Scout was one new boat, there is also Pursuit, and Edgewater,” says MacMillan. “They all came on the market and are arguably better designed than Boston Whaler.”
MacMillan also says there is also a robust market for used boats on the South Shore, and boat brokerages like Mahone Marine and Chris LeBlanc of Chester are active in the used boat market.
LeBlanc, now in his early 30s, began storing boats in the winter months on his parent’s property at St. Margaret’s Bay. He is arguably the most knowledgeable on all things related to Boston Whaler ,and has a Whaler in summer months moored in Chester Front Harbour.
As for Sandy MacMillan, he has a strong political pedigree in his family. He is named after his grandfather, 1940s Liberal premier A.S. MacMillan, who was really the last premier to produce a robust surplus, thanks in that era to taxes on booze and cigarettes.
A.S. MacMillan was Nova Scotia’s wartime premier after Angus L. MacDonald left the premier’s job to be Ottawa’s war minister.
In the 1930s and ’40s, A.S. MacMillan was also a highways minister, and was the first minister to begin a robust paving program across the dirt roads of Nova Scotia.
A classic wooden boat in Chester’s Front Harbour. The Notebook photo
It was a different era back then. When my road-building grandfather, a close friend of A.S. MacMillan, lost a road-building job in Arichat, he got a call when the bids were opened by A.S. MacMillan.
“How bad do you want that job,” MacMillan said to my grandfather. “You better get in your car and present a new bid.”
Today, a highways minister would be fired if he told a road builder to submit a lower bid after tenders are open. As I said, it was a different era then.
Sandy MacMillan also operates a popular retail online presence at yachtshop.ca, which tends to generate sales around the world. He is also a dealer of kayaks and the long-running legendary Laser sailboats that now range up to 20 feet long.
“Someone in Australia or Europe or even South America will order Sperry boat shoes from us,” MacMillan says. “The international market we have grows yearly.”
He ships his online orders via Canada Post daily. MacMillan says his staffer, Angus Buchanan (no relation to John Buchanan) runs the website. Angus has equity with MacMillan in North Sails, which employs four sail makers in historic Lunenburg.
Jamie Moye’s Ontario 32 at Back Harbour Chester, a classic cruising sailboat. Chester/Mahone Bay is the boating capital of Eastern Canada.The Notebook photo
“I’m still the sail maker,” MacMillan says of his role in the company, which tends to have its busy season during the winter months when sailors are not, obviously, chopping around Nova Scotia’s coast.
Wooden boats in Chester, including Wilson Fitt’s 25-year-old custom wood sailboat in Back Harbour Chester. The Notebook
