Atlantic Cove has been the main landing on St. paul Island for hundreds of years. It is hard to imagine it as a busy lifesaving station and later radio station handling ship traffic in the North Atlantic.
The landing spot is at a cut in the rocks to the right of the building seen perched on the cliff edge. I have seen it calm like a mill pond, and also with big waves as we tried to get off during our window of opportunity before a storm.
Although the aerial picture tends to flatten out the look of the area, the old lifesaving station is very much higher than the boathouse down by the cliff. The area is accessed by a road cutting diagonally across the bluff. Actually about 50 years ago it was a road. Now there is a small area of a few inches where a person can walk on the edges of the rock wall up to the house. The "road" now has trees and bushes growing in it.
In 1993, my first time to the island, we set our ham radio station up right in the old storage building on the cliff edge. It is now gone. In 2000 we set up our tents on the edge of the clump of pine trees visible in the left center of the photograph. We set up our sleeping tents on the edge of the cliff straight down from the clump of trees. This was good until the wind started and we found we were in a most exposed position.
Atlantic Cove is really the only reliable landing and departing spot. It might be possible to land elsewhere, but if the wind direction and wave action changed One might find themselves trapped for a long, long, time.
Following are some historical pictures when Atlantic cove was the center of action on st. Paul Island.
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