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Red track on map is going south. Click on map or any photo to enlarge it.
Sept 1 44 hr Passage to Cape Breton
After leaving our friends in Woody Point, Norton, Marina and I sail south along the mountainous coast of Newfoundland through a moonlit night and a sunny day. Then we reach the end of land, and through another moonlit night and another sunny day, we cross the stretch of water between Newfoundland and the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. We try to enter the inlet to the Cape Breton inland waterway, but the current is flowing out with such speed that the lobster buoys are horizontal. We can’t fight it, so we anchor and wait for the tide to change. A fishing boat motors up to check if we’re OK. Once we say we’re waiting out the tide, they’re off. They’re not here to chat.
Sept 4 Baddeck, Cape Breton
This morning the constant waves and wind of the outside sea are just a memory. We sail along the quiet waters of the inland Bras d’Or Lakes just a short distance to the tourist town of Baddeck. Licking ice cream cones and wearing shorts, we feel like we’re in another world. These sheltered bays and lakes of Cape Breton are a playground for boaters.
We’ve come here to put Marina on a bus to Halifax because the sailboat won’t make it there in time for her flight. It would take us days by boat. A bus will take just hours.
Sept 5 Last day as the Three of Us
Marina is leaving tomorrow and we all feel it. For Norton, it marks the end of the Greenland adventure with the last of his crew leaving. He's also saying goodbye to a person who has become a close companion. You never know how it's going to be with three or four people living in close quarters on a small boat, but in this case it's been very good. Marina is direct, generous and funny. I'm going to miss her spark.
We walk around town and discover it’s market day. Our bodies are craving homegrown vegetables so I buy a huge bag of chard and linger over the beauty of local spun-wool and stain-glass. The Alexander Graham Bell museum is just down the street. We spend hours there, discovering the prolific genius of the man.
Back at harbor, we notice boatyard workers hauling in the summer docks and lightweight boats. They tell us a wind is coming and we might want to move to a more sheltered part of the bay. We choose to wait and see. By night it's so choppy we have to admit the locals know their weather better than we do. We pull anchor and motor two miles through the dark, feeling our way to a protected finger bay, crowded with boats doing what we’re doing. Marina fidgets below because we won’t let her steer in the rain. She’s packing for the plane tomorrow and her gear has to stay dry. She’s not used to such coddling.
Sept 6 Goodbye Marina!
Motoring back to town at dawn, Norton slips the boat ever so nicely into the tiny fuel dock space. He’s on deck securing ropes while I’m still trying to figure out where the safest place is to jump from the boat to dock, then I discover the dock rope is tangled around my feet. Dock-jumping is not my forte.
Marina smiles her thanks for the cup of coffee I hand her, and disappears into the bus. We don't linger. Norton never lingers. When he says he's ready to go, the engine will be running before I can say OK. In no time we're fueled up, the water tank is topped off and we're heading south into a light mist.
Between Baddeck and the south side of Cape Breton we’ll be going through two drawbridges and a canal with locks. As the first bridge splits and draws up its arms, I look up at the narrow gap of a few feet, just wide enough for the mast to slip through. A line of cars waits on the bridge as we glide under them.
It's late afternoon as we approach the entrance to the canal. We decide to drop anchor and go through it tomorrow. We’re tired. We need time to absorb and adjust to the change. It’s just the two of us now. No more Norwegian stories, no more rushing to catch a plane, no deadlines at all. We’ll sail by the wind and the weather.
Sept 7 The Lock and the Queen Bee
Hoping to be the first through this next drawbridge and the canal, we arrive by 8 am, but when we radio in, the bridge operator tells us the school buses have to use the bridge for another hour. As we watch yellow buses go by, we entertain ourselves listening to the radio chatter between the bridge operator and the Queen Bee. We’re highly curious who this Queen Bee is and what she will look like. When she appears, she’s a cute little boat piloted by an older woman sailing solo. The woman, who looks like an ordinary 60-70 year old, tells me she started sailing “later in Iife.” Later in life - like me! - but she’s doing it solo! I’m impressed.
We share the lock and wait together while the water level drops. When the gates open, the Queen Bee starts out of the canal, then stops almost immediately with her engine belching black smoke. Pulling up behind her, Norton jumps on board to help. He soon figures out there’s a lack of air because the air intake has been taped shut. They open it and everything works again. She is so relieved. We motor out of the lock and raise our sails in tandem, then the Queen Bee veers away from us and heads for home. Before long she’s gone. On the ocean, people come and go out of our lives so quickly. Yet I can still see her hoisting sail and turning for home.
We start to catch a good wind, then more wind, until it gets too hard for me to handle the wheel ("weather helm".) Norton reefs the mainsail, rolling it down to make it smaller, which eases the pressure on the wheel. The wind increases more, and then it lessens, back and forth all day - reef in, reef out. We find a harbor at 8:30 pm just after sunset. It’s been a long day. Hurricane Leslie is headed our way so we’re pushing it. We want to make it to the protected harbor at Halifax before Leslie does. No one chooses to be at sea or an exposed anchorage during a hurricane, especially in a small boat. It’ll be two more long days to get to Halifax. We anchor at the southern edge of Cape Breton.
Sept 8 Nova Scotia
This morning we cross the stretch of open water south to Nova Scotia, then sail down its eastern coast through intermittent sun and fog. It's the fog I've been worried about the whole trip. I have no experience sailing into a white blanket. How can you tell if a huge boat is about to run you over? Norton shows me how: In the fog, we turn on the radar, so that the screen is split in half - half with the radar, and half with GPS. This way we can tell if the red blotch on the radar is a rocky ledge in the middle of the ocean (which we can identify on the GPS map) or something entirely new, like a fishing boat moving towards us in the fog. Unfortunately small boats don't show up on radar, so we poke along at high alert.
We follow a line of navigation buoys that guide us along the safe channels between islands and submerged rocks. Some buoys have bells, some have fog horns, which, with nothing else to do,we learn to imitate exactly, which cracks us up. On a slow boat you need to create your own entertainment. As we glide by the scenic NS coast, we describe it to each other in colorful detail, because all we can actually see is gray fog, gray ocean and close up things that suddenly appear. White gannets with pink heads skim the waves. A loon dives, swimming forever underwater. Two seals poke up their heads and disappear. Motoring and sailing through mist, fog and sun, it’s a surprisingly pleasant day on the ocean.
Sept 9 Halifax
The fog has cleared. Under blue skies we’re propelled to Halifax on a perfect 20 knot wind. The forecasted rain and headwinds of the approaching storm hold off, but waves are high and I’m feeling a bit seasick. I have three crackers for lunch, nibbled slowly. I don’t go below at all and Norton basically steers the whole eight hours - what a guy! We pull into Halifax at sunset under an odd pink sky and snag a yacht club mooring. The yacht club is empty and there isn’t a restaurant anywhere within walking distance. We settle for a hot shower and a cold beer.
Hello Halifax! - We're only 17 days late! Glad I got to go to Newfoundland!
Sept 10 Hurricane Leslie passes by with an all-day downpour. Norton’s cousin, who is an oceanographer, picks us up for lunch and we have a wonderful visit with him and his wife. Norton gives him the ocean samples he collected near Greenland to help with his cousin’s monitoring of the speed of Gulf Stream currents. We feel so grateful to be in a dry car, chauffeured to the grocery store instead of waiting for the bus in the rain. His cousin then brings us to his favorite laundromat, where for $7 a polite foreign-born man washes, dries and folds our clothes, even my underpants, quite neatly.
Sept 11 To Lunenberg
This morning the sun shines as if the hurricane never was. It’s a pleasant nine hours sail to Lunenburg, with nine hours of good conversation between the two of us. Norton and I find endless things to talk about as we pass the time on a slow boat.
We follow the navigation buoys precisely and don’t hit any submerged rocks, except I almost hit the buoy! Steering to one side of it, I chose the windward side. I forgot the wind is always pushing the boat sideways, downwind, and I would have hit the big metal buoy with our big metal boat if Norton hadn’t warned me to fall off.
Sept 12
For my 66th birthday, I want a relaxed day to do whatever, wandering around the stores and museums of beautiful Lunenburg. As I sit on a balcony overlooking the harbor, eating my lobster cakes, a woman from Florida tells
me how the town was falling into disrepair after the collapse of cod fishing. It was bought up and restored by outsiders who loved coming here for vacation. Now it’s a lively town, with a population of locals and “CFAs” (people who Come From Away.)
Famous schooners dock here. We see the replica of the slave ship Amistad, and two Sea Shepherd boats. Sea Shepherd’s mission, if you don’t know, is to stop huge factory ships from the illegal slaughter of whales and other endangered marine species. The boats are black and ominous, bristling with battering rams, high pressure hoses, electronic antennae. They’re serious. Sept 13
Today is a long 11½ hr sail. We're up at 6, but hitting headwinds we know we won’t make it to our planned destination. We consult the maps and decide to turn in at Joli Harbor. Paddling the dinghy to the shore for a hike, we see a sign that explains how the M’ikmaq Indians historically used this bay as their winter home because it doesn’t freeze and has abundant shellfish. Now it’s a park with pretty trails. Hiking through trees - how unusual! When the mosquitoes find us, we jump in the dinghy and paddle fast into the wind to lose them, but they follow us all the way to the boat. Strong little wings!
Sept 14 Off for Maine!It’s 180 miles from where we are now to Bar Harbor, Maine. That’s at least 30 hours by boat. We have to get there early enough in the day to go through US customs. Up at 6 am, we find ourselves motoring on an unusual silky sea. We round the point of Nova Scotia at 3 pm. A loon calls just then. It’s haunting song thrills me. Moments later we hit the current flooding into the Bay of Fundy, famous for 30-50 foot tides. The current runs a strong 4 knots - going with us, thank God - doubling our speed. What a ride!
At night our self-steering mechanism (we call him “George”) quits, just walked off the job, so we have to steer our watches standing behind the wheel without mechanical back-up. While Norton sleeps, I can’t leave the wheel to make a sandwich or go pee. I plan ahead for 2 am snacks. I bring a pee-bucket on deck. We make the watch two hours instead of three. Two hours isn’t much time for the person sleeping but when you hit the bunk it always feels like a blink anyway. In the dark of the new moon, stars light up the sky, reflecting sparkles on the sea.
Second day of the passage, approaching Maine, we thread our way through an obstacle course of striped lobster pot buoys. (If it’s white and flies away it’s a bird.) They’re so close together we can barely get through without hitting one. I’d hate to be doing this in the dark with the motor running. A lobster pot rope wrapped around the propeller could ruin your whole night. We radio ahead to US Customs at Bar Harbor. Two officers meet us at the dock and chat a bit. They don’t come on board to see if we’re smuggling anything, but ask us what we do for work. Is this normal Homeland Security procedure? “Retired” sounds good to them.
Bar Harbor has a free bus that takes you from town to all the Mt Desert trails. It’s Sunday and there are people everywhere, even old people sitting on lawn chairs on the ledges watching the surf crash. By afternoon we’re done climbing mountains and we're back on the boat, sailing a couple of hours west around Mt Desert Island to Seal Harbor. A friend’s sister, 74 years old, is waiting at the dock. She uses a cane to walk but catches the bowline expertly. At her home, which was her grandparents’ home, she feeds us funny, almost shocking, family stories over tea. Her husband pores over the chart to point out a few interesting bays to anchor in. They tell us to come back - Maine has so many more islands to explore.
Sept 17 Cranberry Cove and Black Island
At mid-day we’re waiting for high tide so we can slip the boat over the sandbar into Cranberry Cove. Norton is rolled up in the quilt asleep. He’s still recovering from Greenland. Since May 15, when he and Barry first brought the boat up from Florida to Maine, then picked up the rest of the crew and sailed to Greenland and back, he’s been on a schedule. As captain, he’s been responsible for everything - the navigation, boat repairs and safety, everyone getting along - for four months! He's earned a nap in the sun. We do a quick exploration of Cranberry Cove. This is the fishing community featured in a true and fascinating story, The Secret Life of Lobsters. Then we take off for nearby Black Island.
As we approach, we see it consists of beautiful slabs of granite. Worked as a quarry from the mid-1880s until 1930, it built state capital buildings in Boston and beyond. Now it's conservation land. We look up it’s history on the internet and discover that the man who spearheaded the effort to preserve this land was the same person - Ned Cabot - who was washed overboard at Newfoundland. Again, we reflect on the loss of a good man.
Around the bend of the island we find several circular enclosures with nets over them and big fish jumping inside. It’s a private fish farm, must be salmon.
Sept 18 Deer Isle
Sailing southwest along Eggemoggin Reach, we’re followed by an elegant schooner with brown sails, which soon passes us. Expecting a front tonight, we duck into the protection of Buck’s Harbor, but it’s small, crowded with boats and the wind hits us from two directions - not a good place to sleep through a storm. We decide to try another harbor. As we sail out again, the rising wind pushes us at an exciting clip to Northwest Harbor on Deer Isle.
Once anchored in the calm of harbor, we paddle the dinghy to the beach, and go looking for a grocery store. “Just a mile up the road” someone tells us. We walk and walk. It’s getting more rural. Seeing a gallery that looks open, I ask the owner where the store is. She says, “By the time you walk there, the tide will be out, the whole bay will be a mudflat and you and your dinghy will be stranded.” (“You’ll be screwed” is what she really said.) She puts a “back later” sign on the door, drives us to the store and then back to the dinghy, which is thankfully only 10 feet out of the water at this point. We pole ourselves back to the boat in a few inches of water over the mud.
Midnight. The wind is gusty, pushing the boat side to side. Norton wakes up because the boat is not rocking side to side anymore. The anchor is dragging! We jump up but it’s too dark to see where we are in relation to the land. We turn on the GPS, which shows our original track and where we are now. We’ve drifted a long ways, but we haven’t run aground. Norton pulls up the anchor, we start the engine and follow that GPS track back to our original anchor location, this time dropping 130 ft of chain, four times what we did before. It works, but we sleep fitfully.
Sept 19 Landing in Rockland
Rockland, Maine, our final destination, is only a couple of hours away. Now we see the familiar skyline of the harbor. It’s hard to believe we’re at the end of the traveling. How do you say good-bye to a sailing adventure? Norton knows how. He heads straight for the dock so we can hose down the sails with fresh water. Our work now is to clean, pull stuff out of the corners, find out what mildewed (almost everything in the forepeak), sort what to take and what to leave on the boat, and most important, to wash the salt off everything (and lick it to see if we got it.) We meet our friends David and Rose for dinner.
Sept 20 Packing it all away, leaving it clean and dry
Raising the sails to dry in the wind, we fold them in the afternoon and bring them below. I fold myself into a pretzel to get into the engine compartment to sponge out water, so Norton can scrape and paint the rust. Several hours later he looks in and says “Uh oh.” All those areas are filled with water again. There’s a leak somewhere he’s got to find.
Boat on the Hard:
I sleep late to relish my last time rocking in bed on the water. We do the last rites: pumping out the head and filling the tank with gas so it won’t rust during the following months. We motor to the boatyard where the men lower two slings under the boat. Slowly the whole eleven tons of it lifts out of the water. A crane with wheels drives it to a parking spot where it is lowered onto metal supports "on the hard." (Hopefully the ground is hard. We heard of one sandy boatyard in the Caribbean where the supports sank in heavy rain and the boats toppled like dominoes.)
Now we can examine the damage on the hull where the boat hit ice in the Arctic. Not too bad, just one dent. The boat brushed by many bergy bits, Norton says, but he remembers the moment when he hit one hard, right where it had a big rock frozen into it. Next day it’s raining, so we’re working below-decks. It’s another day of tedious and confusing work because heavy sails and things pulled out of corners are on every surface down below. I hardly know where to put my cleaning rag. Looking at things closely for the first time, I find mildew around every hatch, even over our bed. How pleasant - mold spores were drifting down on us as we slept! My friend recommends “mold-be-gone” (every store in Maine seems to have it) which I apply liberally. Next I wipe the gaskets around the portholes free of salt and oil them so they won’t dry out and leak next trip. Books and bunks do not fare well under dripping windows. I wash every wall, every bit of ceiling and floor, even the slimy bilge. The yuk factor is high. Norton fixes the engine and other things that only he can do.
What a difference a sunny day can make! On the last day we can scrape, sand, paint and varnish on the outside, at least two or three coats each on wood and metal. People walk by with a smile because they know what it takes. They've all done this at the end of a trip - unless they've hired someone else to do it, which is beginning to sound like a great idea. Finally we've done all we can. We stretch a tarp tight over the deck to protect it from the worst of the weather, pack up all the food, clothes and tools into the car, and say good-bye to the boat for a year.
A backward glance, to make sure the boat is still upright, and we begin the next leg of our journey, driving my dad's 1992 Volvo from Maine to Oregon.
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