Bluenoser saw your 1st post and meant to warn you, but never got around to it.
Having a fair amount of experience with new england surf and knowing the set ups in Nova Scotia are similar yet more vast and untapped to some degree, I can say surfwise if you were living costal back there with easy access to point surf you probably had it better than living in the valley here in OR. Especially if you ended up in Salem, OR’s arm pit to put it nicely. I know the grass is always greener and such.
There’s really nothing like the point breaks in Nova Scotia here. There’s no Cow Bay and anything that even slightly resembles a point break is localized by often aggressive self-entitled douche bags. Although there’s consistent swell sources it’s often too much with not many breaks holding anything over 8’ unless you have a sack of steel as you are experiencing.
As far as surfable waves, I’d say the average surfer back there prob gets more days and higher quality than the valley surfer here in Oregon even with the long flat spells the Atlantic often has. I’m a quality over quantity guy and would take 1-3 quality sessions a month over 6-12 crappy sessions. And as for cold, I know it’s really cold back there, but you didn’t choose a place much warmer. Just wait until you feel the summer water temps.
Your new reality is beach break and being able to catch the windows especially in the winter time, which are often brief with abundant low pressure systems and short days. While the last 3 winters have been abnormal, this winter is fairly standard. Without a flexible schedule it only gets harder. That said it can get good and occasionally you will find a really good sandbar that produces comparable surf to what you were familiar with in NS, but a solid drop and occasional barrel or 4 legit turns on a wave is pretty good here.
You have to be very hungry to score good waves esp. from the valley and will have to put in time and a lot of effort and often make the best out of marginal waves. Upside is outside of surfing, there are many recreational activities you can’t do back there. One being snowboarding or skiing in the Cascades, which has been exceptional this winter so far.
Not to make you home sick, but sounds like it’s been a pretty good winter back there and was one of the warmer early winters in recent memory. Even the B.C. pros are stoking on it back there.
Routine is a vampire. Manu Chao-