By Brett Bundale, The Canadian Press | 4 min. read
HALIFAX – It started as a Coast Guard facility, two aging brick buildings on the Dartmouth side of Halifax Harbour.
Today, they’ve been updated with modern steel-grey siding, a nod to the nearby sea and the site’s new purpose as the Centre for Ocean Ventures and Entrepreneurship, or COVE.
Along a wharf that once moored federal patrol ships, research vessels with ocean monitoring equipment now rent berths.
The inside is also unrecognizable from its Coast Guard origins: machine shops whir with the sound of high-tech equipment, engineers tweak the latest prototypes, entrepreneurs work in a startup yard, and office and meeting spaces are filled with some of the greatest minds in the field of ocean technology.
“People from the Coast Guard come here and say, ‘I worked here 15 years ago, and I never imagined this is what it could be,’” said COVE chief executive Melanie Nadeau during a wide-ranging interview.
“It shows how we’ve repurposed this site to create a cluster of innovators around marine technologies.”
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