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You can check out fishing boats moored at the docks in North Head, Grand Harbour or Seal Cove, the island's three main villages, and learn about the state of the world from the fishermen there. You can go seaside biking for 33 kilometres on the island's only, and not-too-busy, main road. You might beachcomb at low tide for shells, driftwood and flotsam or see the island's stunning geological history laid bare at a number of intriguing cliffs and rock exposures or do some wetland birding at Castalia Marsh. If the sea is calm, you might explore hidden coves on a guided kayak trip or take a fishing-boat tour to Machias Seal Island to watch puffins and other seabirds.

On this misty September afternoon, the second day of my visit, I choose to hike the trail between Whale Cove and Hole in the Wall, a distinctive, often-photographed rock formation on the northeast shore that looks like, well, a hole in a wall. Footpaths trace much of the island's northern and western shoreline, and I've always thought of them as among Grand Manan's highlights. In the 19th century, Grand Mananers used the trails during shipwreck rescue and salvage operations, such as the one for the Lord Ashburton, which foundered off the northeast coast in January 1857 claiming 21 lives. I'm told you can still pick up small, pellet-like bits of the ship's ballast when Fundy's legendary tides — the highest on Earth, rising and falling twice daily more than 16 metres in some locations along the bay — expose the rocky beach near the site.

These coastal trails are not for neophytes. Markers tacked to trees help you find your way, but not all the paths are maintained. On the west side of the island, I've often had to bushwhack through areas of dense brush and scraggly trees felled by gales. But the battle is always worth it. Here and there, the vegetation opens up to afford a lookout of dizzying precipices and receding headlands, the blue Bay of Fundy and, just under 13 kilometres to the west, the Maine coast and Deer and Campobello islands. The most jaw-dropping views are at Southwest Head, where a lighthouse and foghorn overlook dramatic 90-metre basalt cliffs that plunge straight into the sea. The only fences are near the lighthouse. Elsewhere, your fate is in your footfall: one misstep near a cliff's crumbling edge, and you, too, are history.

When fog delays my whale-watch yet again, I find history of another sort at the Grand Manan Museum in Grand Harbour. I spend a few hours there learning about the island's geology, flora and fauna, lighthouses and fog stations and gawk at the museum's prized collection of some 300 birds — including bald eagles and albatrosses, owls, puffins and plovers — found on Grand Manan and beyond. The specimens, donated by the late Allan Moses to the people of island in 1951, represent three generations of family nature study. I peruse a smaller tribute to American novelist Willa Cather, who summered at Whale Cove from 1922 to 1945, the museum's nod to the artists, writers and photographers who still find Grand Manan a source of creative inspiration. Other displays portray the earliest visitors to the island: the Passamaquoddy Nation, Basque fishermen, 16thcentury explorers, such as Samuel de Champlain, and United Empire Loyalists, who first settled the area in 1784 and initiated the 200-year transformation of the island from a remote, hardscrabble outpost to one of New Brunswick's most thriving fishing communities and a model of rich Maritime culture.

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Until a few years ago, a lot of the herring catch went to Seal Cove on the south shore, the home of Grand Manan's former smoked-herring industry. Workers pickled the fish, split them by hand and hung them on sticks for three weeks in smokehouses, barnlike structures with cedar shingles and red-shuttered doors that were built during the industry's heyday, between 1870 and 1930. These weathered structures still line Seal Cove's picturesque harbour, and one contains the Sardine Museum and Herring Hall of Fame, an offbeat tourist attraction established by a wealthy New Yorker to exhibit obsolete fishing equipment as modern art. Most of the remaining smokehouses now function as storage sheds and workshops for the lobster fishery. For the past couple of years, lobster has been a more lucrative catch than herring or other island exports, such as scallops dragged from the sea bottom, salmon farmed in aquaculture operations and dulse, an edible red seaweed harvested in the vicinity of Dark Harbour, the only protected cove on the west shore. I've snacked on my share of delectable sun-dried dulse, which has a paper-thin leathery texture and the salty taste of the seashore.

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FISHING SUCCESS may be inconsistent, but the whale-watching business is always brisk when the tourist season is blessed with favourable weather. And, as luck would have it, my fourth and final day on Grand Manan dawns sunny, thus hoisting the anchor on my own much-anticipated whale-watch aboard the Elsie Menota, a 17-metre yacht skippered by Sarah McDonald with guide Laurie Murison, a marine biologist from the Grand Manan Whale & Seabird Research Station.

My shipmates include two groups of teenage school kids from Saint John and Grand Manan and a knot of binocular- and camera-toting tourists. We motor slowly out of North Head and are soon bouncing, yawing and splashing in three-metre-high Fundy waves. It's a great day for sailing but less than ideal for whale-watching. On calm days, you might spot dozens of ocean giants, but due to the heaving swells, three or four distant glimpses of a lone humpback's glistening back and tail are all we see on our 3½-hour cruise. No matter. The trip is a blast for a landlubber like me as Murison is a fount of knowledge about whales, Grand Manan and the Bay of Fundy ecosystem.

As we disembark at the North Head wharf, my shipmates hustle to board the second-last ferry of the day, which leaves in 30 minutes for the mainland. As I deliberate about my next move, I realize that all my trips to Grand Manan end the same way: I don't want to leave.

So I'll take my chances with the last ferry. I've heard there's a fault at Red Point, first discovered in 1839 by Abraham Gesner, then provincial geologist of New Brunswick. From the beach below, you can see the rock — pre-Acadian sedimentary and Triassic volcanic — of two geological periods clearly delineated in the cliff face. It's just another of those fascinating and unexpected moments that make Grand Manan unique.

With three hours to spare, I'm not leaving till I see it.

Kingston journalist Alec Ross has travelled widely across Canada writing about the charms of communities that lie off the beaten track. Photographer Brian Atkinson is based in Fredericton, N.B.

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