Peggy's Cove receives more than 700,000 visitors annually, yet fewer than one in ten arrive by water — the route mariners have used since the fishing settlement was charted in 1811. The harbour route from Halifax traces the thirty-kilometre corridor that connects the provincial capital to the exposed granite shelf at Peggy's Point, where the iconic octagonal lighthouse has marked the entrance to St. Margaret's Bay since 1915. The current tower, painted in its signature red and white daymark pattern, replaced an earlier wooden structure and remains one of the most photographed beacons in the Atlantic provinces. The village's name likely derives from St. Margaret's Bay itself, though local folklore attributes it to a young woman named Margaret who survived a shipwreck in the late eighteenth century. What began as a subsistence fishing outpost evolved into a working harbour community, its weathered fish shacks and stacked lobster traps framing the granite slabs that slope into the Atlantic. William deGarthe, a Finnish-Canadian sculptor who settled here in the 1950s, carved a thirty-metre memorial into the granite outcrop behind his former residence — a frieze of local fishermen, their families, and the legendary figure of Peggy herself, rendered in deep relief across the living rock. Today's departure options range from amphibious harbour hoppers that transition from Halifax streets to open water, to express shuttles that bypass the inland highway in favor of coastal passage, to full-day charters that extend south to Lunenburg and the Ovens Natural Park. Most vessels depart from the Halifax waterfront between Cable Wharf and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, where interpretive panels document the city's role as a transatlantic port and the 1917 Halifax Explosion, the largest man-made detonation prior to the atomic age. The forty-five-minute passage out of the harbour follows the same fairway used by container ships and naval vessels, past McNabs Island and the outer fortifications that once defended the harbor entrance. Peggy's Cove itself occupies a six-hectare reserve within the larger community of Indian Harbour, its boundaries defined by the Preservation Area established in 1962 to protect the site from commercial development. The lighthouse stands twenty-four metres above the high-water mark, its light visible for twenty-six kilometres on clear nights. The surrounding barrens, scoured smooth by glacial action and salt spray, support only low-growing juniper, crowberry, and stunted spruce — a landscape that has changed little since the last ice sheet retreated twelve thousand years ago.