Hunt for Nova Scotia replica schooner ends at the wood chipper

A historical society's search for the replica of the last cargo schooner ever built in Nova Scotia has ended in disappointment after it was confirmed Friday the vessel ended up on the scrap heap.

The Avon River Heritage Museum in the Annapolis Valley had made an appeal for help finding the Avon Spirit, which was built in the mid-1990s to raise money for the society and promote the Avondale area's shipbuilding history.

It was later sold and passed through several hands. The last the group heard was that it had been punctured in a tropical storm, was suffering from dry rot and had been sent to the wood chipper, said museum manager Tacha Reed.

Last week, however, a man from Cape Breton reported seeing it in Donkin, N.S., she said, raising hopes it was still intact.

"That would be just amazing," Reed told CBC Cape Breton's Information Morning on Friday.

False hope

It turns out, unfortunately, the first story is the true one.

Shortly after that interview, Baddeck Marine, a marine services company in Cape Breton, which took over ownership of the Avon Spirit a few years ago, confirmed it was demolished in 2012.

"She was starting to fall apart," Baddeck Marine owner Stuart Germani said in an interview, adding it only took a short time for a backhoe to finish the job.

The history behind it

It's a sad end for a vessel that had Avondale very excited back in 1996 when it was launched at Newport Landing.

The area was the site of the Harvie and Mosher shipyards, where 160 sailing vessels were built and launched more than a hundred years ago.

The Avon Spirit was designed as a reproduction of the F.B.G., which in 1929 was the last cargo schooner constructed in Nova Scotia. The F.B.G. carried coal around ports in the Minas Basin and the Avon River and ended up being wrecked during Hurricane Edna in 1954 near her home port of Kingsport, N.S.

'The rot was spreading'

The Avon Spirit was owned between 2005 and 2010 by Perry MacKinnon, who operated Sea Visions Whale Watch in Ingonish in Cape Breton.

But when parts of the vessel began to rot badly, MacKinnon pulled it ashore at Dundee Marina, which was at that time owned by Baddeck Marine.

"It was high and dry there for about a year," he said, adding the problem just got worse. "I wasn't catching up. The rot was spreading."

In the end MacKinnon couldn't afford to do all the necessary repairs plus pay what he owed to the facility for keeping the ship there. "Marine fees were piling up. I left it in their hands."

MacKinnon said false hope that the Avon Spirit was still afloat was generated by a sighting last fall of an Australian vessel off Cape Breton's Sydney harbour that "looks almost identical."