Hanging in St Pierre

Tomorrow is Saturday July 13th and because the weather is forecast to be foggy, the town has decided to hold its Bastille day celebrations 1 day early.  

Today though, is about undoing some of the sleep deprivation we have put ourselves through over the past few days.  We talk this through and come to the conclusion that it is the switch from shore sleep to passage making patten that is the bugger. We never get in the groove when we are at sea as the longest period is only 3/4 days. I’m wrecked but don’t sleep that well. 

After a fitful doze, we are rested enough hit the town and a decent restaurant with a bottle of fine wine.  Lobster is on the menu and is surprisingly affordable at only 14€ for half. We go for it and are rewarded with the best meal for weeks. Sadly this high point is not repeated as the restaurants are either full or closed for the remainder of our stay. 

Saturday sees the town in full party mode with the mayor making a long speech in the town square to which the audience politely listens before then ploughing in to the mayors free wine and nibbles. For about an hour and a half I refill my beaker with red wine and canapés. I am feeling no pain by 2pm. 

It’s a glorious sunny day as we walk round. I even manage to get a little sunburn. That’s a pretty rare thing around here. We walk the waterfront and commercial docks and see the harbour navigation buoys clearly for the first time. All looks straightforward in this light. 

Our customs man said that there was live Irish music (sort of, the band were from St John’s) so we go to the venue at 9pm. It is pretty much deserted as the band limbers up. Once the tunes get going, a crowd comes in and the place is hopping….literally. Who knew the French were such keen set dancers. Then the penny drops and I recognise our Customs man as he joins the band for a few tunes. He is a really good whistle player. We get chatting and he is from Brittany where there is a big Celtic music scene. 

There are fireworks scheduled half way through the set so the band breaks but after 30 mins, we abandon the town square to return to the pub. Only sparklers we see are those on the main stage. 

We leave the pub about midnight and I am a little worse for wear. Now comes the challenge…..we have to paddle our micro 3 person dingy out to the boat in the dark. It’s not far but I am conscious that I have had a few so am really careful. A cold bath right now is a really bad idea. 

Next morning comes around and we discover that nothing is open. It’s July 14th and a Sunday.  The perfect storm for tourists. I wander the area for 6 hours hoping to find  a place to sit and graze but nothing doing. Lots of strangely weathered wooden houses and peeling paint match the misty mood. 

In my desperation for something to see or do in the mist, I take a walk out to see the airport which is empty except for two solitary lost souls and their baggage. It’s a small but very modern facility which boasts direct flights to Paris. Tomorrow is Monday and most restaurants are shut then too. Bugger. 

We retreat to the boat with a pack of readymade galettes, cheese and butter sourced from the most expensive (but at least open) convenience store on the planet and raid the ships stores.  F dons his chefs hat and makes us some tasty galettes. 

Tomorrow we head for St John’s about 200 miles away. 

Halifax to St Pierre (It’s France Baby!)

We leave the friendly yacht club behind and set off down the harbour in the mist. I didn’t see the banks of the harbour on the way in because I was asleep and I am no wiser on the way out again. We know the wind will not be available till later in the morning so it’s all in the plan to be motoring at this stage.

Eventually we get a little breeze and we are mercifully spared the engine chugging for a while.  F is actually strangely pleased to be motoring to use up some fuel as he suspects that he has filled the tanks to the brim. 

We break out the stash of tasty chocolate banana cakes that our kindly yacht club friend provided and celebrate the return to the high seas.

But the wind is driving us dead east which will be a pain if it keeps up in this direction. It’s better than no wind so we go with it for now. Eventually it just stops so we have a change of plan and begin to motor again. This leg of the trip is about 340 miles so we can’t afford to just wait it out. 

F has some fishing lures aboard so we try dragging a long line for a while but at 4 knots, the line never sinks deep enough do we get nothing.

Our crappy wind and fog continues as we approach the Cabot strait. Apparently this stretch of water can be lumpy so I have an underlying worry of seeing my breakfast for the second time. I have not been seasick yet but there is always the slight oily sensation in my guts which reminds me that Krakatoa could be just around the corner.

Thursday comes and we continue to motorsail.  At 6pm, there’s a small breeze go F decides it’s time to bring out the big guns and we launch the spinnaker. I need to get some shuteye before my watch at 9 so I leave him to it and go below. About an hour later, it’s clear the wind and sea state are not favourable for the big sail so we take it down again and motor sail. But at least we try.  We slow our speed to try time our arrival in daylight  

Approaching the islands, we stop motoring and try to sail the last bit and we succeed for a while but eventually the wind fails to play ball and we get the motor going  again. We skirt the cliffs along the west side of st Pierre and have to get within 250m to see them.  The pace is teeming with seabirds and I think it smells a bit like smoked mackerel. F corrects me that it is guano… birdshit. 

We get a gap in the mist for a few minutes and see the beautiful scenery as we pass between the islands.  Normal service is soon resumed as we approach the harbour with visibility down to less than 200m.  We are navigating now by iPad and gps from buoy to buoy.  It is a little tense as we inch towards the harbour passing an outgoing yacht on the way.

We are met 6 separate officials on the dockside, a new record. The yacht club members in Halifax had warned us that we would get a proper investigation with floors up and endoscopic cameras here but they were friendly and welcoming . I get a tip from one about an Irish music session tomorrow evening in a bar in town . Result! We are permitted to stay on the quay for 2 days and then we have to move to a buoy as they are planning to do works on the pier first thing Monday morning. 

More DIY

 We left CT with a long list of stuff that was ostensibly to be fixed in Halifax. We now review the list and decide that some of it we just won’t bother with. A few leaks are not a big deal (they are in my bunk area anyhow) we shorten the list and focus on the critical areas. The locals in the marina tell me we need a working radar for Newfoundland. Apparently ‘they make fog up there!’ That cheers me up….

I take our stinky laundry to be washed and the lovely lady takes a bit of a shine to me and deals with our stuff whilst I go for a coffee. She has been on some CIE bus tour of Ireland years ago and tells me all about it.  Her daughter visited last year and apparently wanted to go back to live. We go there and they come here…

Later on Sunday afternoon we go downtown, me to take a look and F to try buy a backup gas ring. The boat is equipped with a single small Butane gas bottle and has European standard connectors. The only bottles available in USA and Canada have different connectors so either gas rationing will have to be enforced or a backup solution uses . Luckily for me, there will be enough gas to make a brew for at least the next 2 weeks😜 come September, the Coleman stove might be deployed. 

F has finally conceded this his ancient iPad might not be up to the job and dispatches me to the local apple shop to procure its successor. Our FD back in NY has approved the spend weeks ago so I am relieved not to have to rely on the ancient original. This is the source of all our navigation for the trip (apart from F’s equally ancient iPhone) so it is a critical component. It takes hours to transfer the contents but eventually we get there.

We prep to leave tomorrow and have one last meal and a beer in the clubhouse and say farewell to the waiting staff. They are run off their feet busy but still take the time to say a kind goodbye.

 

Arriving in Halifax

We arrive and drop anchor near the marina with a few other boats. We try to call the border service but their published their number doesn’t work.  It’s a beautiful still summer morning and the rowers are out in force. We disturb a resting cormorant and then retire for a couple hours rest and then dock at the fuel pontoon and try to get in contact with the customs again. 

The friendly marina  crew lend us a phone and it magically works. We register our arrival and 10 mins later a large black truck appears and out pop black clad armed and bullet proof vested serious looking guys and so begins our grilling.

They ask lots of open questions about what we did immediately on arriving and ask us to show our phone logs to prove we tried to call to register.  The number published is non-geographic which neither of our roaming eSims can access. Catch-22 and a bit of a fail for the CBP tech team as non local sims  (just the people that need to) are going to really struggle to call them. It dawns on the CBP guys that we are not international wine smugglers and they ease up. They reveal they have been tracking us on AIS all along so good thing we didn’t tell any porkies. In the end they stay on the dock and no rubber gloves are harmed. We begin chatting and they offer some local guidance, just the beginning of truly amazing Canadian friendliness. We remove the quarantine flag and are now free to get off the boat .

After a rest and a beer we decide to investigate our wayward radar. Our sum knowledge and experience with these devices is precisely zero. F goes up the mast (again) to retrieve the emitter dome whilst I worry about falling tools penetrating my skull.  

With the device on the bench we cable test the thing and find only one semi loose connection. Slightly concerned about microwaving our eyeballs (apparently a risk according to the ‘internet’) we lay the emitter on my bunk and fire it up from a safe distance to precisely zero effect. Still as dead as a dodo. F later bites the bullet and takes it to the local expert who pronounces the last rites on the motherboard. The only option now is to buy another which he does and arranges delivery to St John’s in Newfoundland.  Till then we will rely on water based technology. 

Friday night sees us as almost the entire audience for a local guitar club who use the marina. It is good fun and I get in the mood and sing along when I know the tunes.  The band as love it and buy us a drink. Next day, one of the band members appears with a bag of home made banana cake buns. This is Canadian hospitality at its finest.

Marthas Vineyard to Novascotia Part 2

After a good soaking whilst on watch overnight and being entertained for a few hours by lightning flashes in pretty much every direction, I go to bed at 2am and F takes over.  We had been due to swap over at midnight but I let him sleep till 2 to get some rest. I had woken him up as I was worried about changing sail on my own when the wind died so he is kind to me and let us motor for a few hours.  I had been warned by my sister Mairead that this was ‘not the sailing way’.  It seems only fair to let him get some proper rest as I was being a sailing wus. Anyhow put-putting along in very light winds gets us closer to our destination albeit at only 4 knots and given we (by that i mean me) are on a schedule and days lost to bobbing around cannot be added back in at the end.

I am due on watch again at 5am but F lets me rest and I awake to find us slipping along at a healthy 6 knots. Excellent news. That breeze helps up for most of the morning but by midday it is all a bit of a wet fart and we are back to bobbing along chasing every little puff.

The sunsets at sea can be truly amazing especially when the sea is glassy flat. Not great for sailing but beautiful. It puts you in a really zen mood with just the gentle burble of the boat slipping through the water. Like a good mug of camomile tea…maybe. I have never had the stuff.

Another very calm night sees us just off the coast of the southern tip of NS. Winds are now very light and from exactly the direction we need to go so we try to sail to windward, For the non sailing community, a sailboat cannot sail directly into the wind, it needs to zig-zag (called tacking) at angles towards the destination. The tighter the angle you can make, the better your upwind progress will be. Typically an angle of about 45 degrees is accepted as a reasonably good tacking angle i.e. you make 90 degree turns into the wind as you turn. Unfortunately, it seems as our sails have lost some of the spring of their youth and we are only making 55 degree turns. This turns out to be a bit of a ball-ache in these light winds as we do-not really make much progress to our destination.

We spend an hour trying out various tweaks to the trim of the sails and fly some ribbons up the rigging to try figure out what our issue is but all ultimately to no avail. We have made precisely 3 miles progress to Halifax in 4 hours and so we decide to start the engine and motor to the nearest port of entry which is Shelbourne about 40 miles north of us. Our first entry into Canada needs to be into an official ‘port of entry and this is the closest one & Halifax is still over a hundred miles away. The weather forecast is for virtually no wind for the foreseeable future and bobbing around out here is a waste of time so we make the decision to light up the afterburner and head to Shelbourne. 

The engine is duly engaged and after an hour, we notice the engine battery is not being charged by the alternator This is not good. We need a battery to run the engine and although we also have another ‘house’ battery to run the instruments and navigation etc, the engine battery is separate. Motoring to Shelbourne on a declining engine battery alone is probably not possible. The engine controls are also behaving strangely with odd alarms and the rev counter not working. This further raises the worry level. Shitty wind and engine not behaving normally.

Why the alternator is not doing its  is a mystery to us and we chase down loose connections and look for wiring breaks. It all comes back clean. As the battery comes closer to its fully discharged state, we connect the house and engine batteries and then magically, the alternator kicks into life. Woop! The relief is palpable.

This completely changes the calculus on where to head and I suggest to F that we just bite the bullet and motor sail to Halifax. We now have enough fuel and power to get to Halifax and going to Shelbourne would only delay the overall trip schedule. F nearly bites my hand off accepting the suggestion as he is thinking exactly the same way. We are mightily relieved to have a clear plan and head off across the still glassy sea with a beautiful sunset.

Overnight, the stars are amazingly clear. There is no light pollution and I can see the Milky Way. I can’t remember seeing it recently and it is an amazing sight. The sea is so calm, i can snap a picture of the plough constellation and the pole star. That’s pretty cool. And the engine goes on and on….eventually you don’t really hear it….like when you live next door to a train track. You come to miss it when it’s not there.

And all next day….we motor sail most of the time with a couple of short interludes of wind power but it never really gets going. We inch our way close to Halifax and as we approach to within 30 miles we deliberately slow down so as to arrive in daylight. This make slow going even slower as we drop the boat speed to about 2.7 knots but it is necessary. F considers a bath but even though we both identify the other to be the chief source if the odour problem aboard, I think the North Atlantic a step too far  

F goes to sleep and I have the boat until midnight but we make a simple but critical error by not stating clearly what the approach plan is. I have a different interpretation to F and whilst he is asleep, I plough on my merry way and take us towards a channel marked by a series of red and green navigation lights. The channel is well marked and easy to follow. F thinks we will go outside these and approach by the main shipping channel. 

We don’t have a paper chart for the approach and are relying on iPhone/iPad and have different apps with different chart applications. In theory, they are the same but the visibility of shallow points is more highlighted in his version. The current drifts the boat to the right of the main channel red markers and I check my chart and see no danger… but I make a serious error. I cannot see the 1.3M shallow close to us at the zoom level that I am using. By now, I have roused F for his turn on watch and he hears water breaking on something and and quickly steers away. I am oblivious…..it’s a scary moment as I am unaware of the danger. Shit. It is close but I don’t really know how close until I grab this screenshot later.

We navigate away with me now paranoid and spotting navigation marks for F for the next 2 hours and then I retire to bed. Our plan is to anchor up outside Halifax main harbour and then motor up the left hand channel to a Marina right at the end. 

In the end, F skips the anchoring outside a continues up the left hand branch of the harbour whilst I doze. I wake to find us beside the Marina on a glorious sunny morning and we congratulate each other on getting here.

Marthas Vineyard to Novascotia Part 1

We leave in misty/foggy conditions with a good breeze pushing us along and navigate the shoals to exit Nantucket sound. The aim is to go north along the west side of Chappaquidick Island ( ring any bells?…Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 involving Senator Ted Kennedy) and then turn right (I mean East!) to leave the sound just south of Cape Cod. We spend the main part of the morning navigating buoy to buoy in the fog with unseen fishing vessels around us. We hail one up by VHF who is on the opposite bearing to let them know we will pass just to the south of them. I hear the engine but see only the smallest glimmer of a shape in the white and we pass each other within a couple of hundred meters. It is difficult to see the navigation boys from more than 200m  

Thankfully we have AIS installed. We would be blind without it in conditions like this. AIS (Automatic Identification System)  allows vessels to automatically share key data like position, bearing, speed, size and vessel name. The signal is relayed vessel to vessel by VHF in the area using a mesh network and ultimately ends up available on the internet. We get a little display of all the vessels equipped with AIS in our vicinity (about 20 miles) and so can see what we are about to collide with or what is about to run us over. Some of the big ships travel at pretty high speed (35mph) and they can be on you very quickly. The down side is that not everybody has AIS…..and rocks, fishing lines and navigation buoys don’t either so you have to keep your eyes peeled. Usually you would use radar to detect these but ours is on the blink and on the to-do list for Halifax.

By 2PM we’re happy to be at the exit of Nantucket sound and give ourselves a little pat on the back. We are free of the worry of running into something fixed to the earths crust for the next few days as we head out into the Gulf of Maine. Floating things are still a risk but visibility steadily improves throughout the day and so we begin to relax and get into the rhythm for the passage to Halifax. We estimate it will take 3 to 4 days depending on the winds. Regular 8 hour sleeps go out the window as we take turns on watch. (Sleep deprivation torture was probably invented by mariners.) I am a solid 8 hours a night guy and this is going to be a challenge. More about that later.

By afternoon, the weather gods start to play games and the misty conditions return and it starts to rain. Proper big fat heavy drops at times which look quite cool out in the North Atlantic but still surprising to see ripples from the drops like on a pond. 

A nice fresh breeze clears the air and we get going again with a lovely sunset but with thunder clouds starting to appear on the horizon in some directions. This is  a bit of a worry as lightning around a boat is pretty, it also cause a degree of tightening of the rear sphincter.

We’re going

Sunday AM and although the wind is still up it should die down by tonight so F judges it time to leave. We have had a tough time deciding when is the right time to go with forecast of high winds but then followed by light/adverse winds afterwards. Nobody wants to risk going out in a gale but if we hand around here, we could lose a whole bunch of time.

It’s warm and wet with light rain and mist, looking forward to puking a lot in my foul weather gear. We haul up the anchor and set out into a misty breezy day and set off. Lots of GPS navigation rather than old fashioned charts and compass bearings. We don’t have the charts and you can’t see very much in the mist anyway

We’ll be out of comms for about 4 days or so and the target is Halifax. I’ll update this when we land.