Back to Shelburne NS Canada

Sailing and having fun has got in the way of Blog writing again! So, whilst we work on the missing 8 entries I’ve posted this one to bring you up to date on where we are. When we don’t get quite so distracted with sailing and trying to reboot a frustrating iPad that keep shutting down, we’ll fill in the missing parts of the adventure. 

Leaving La Have River

Our press westwards along the southern Nova Scotian coast continued on Friday 7 Sept with an even earlier start. So much so that we left La Have River at 0610hrs, just as dawn was breaking.  A hot mug of tea and a beautifully lit up dawn sky somewhat made up for the 0500hrs alarm clock call.

Passing West Ironbound Island

The reason for the early start was not because of tides but was to make the best of the forecast favourable wind again. It was supposed to be even better than yesterday with an excellent 15kts from the northeast in the morning but petering out as the day went on, hence the 0500hrs alarm call.

The wind did not materialise as forecast until we had motored for an hour and a half.  At that point, with 10kts of wind, we poled out the genoa and proceeded at a gentle pace anticipating 15kts at any moment.

Half an hour later we decided that 10kts was all that we were going to get and so we replaced the genoa with the much more colourful MPS.

We sailed with the MPS until past midday but then found that, with the dying wind,  the waves were nodding BV too much and the large sail was just collapsing.  So sadly, sailing stopped and motoring commenced again until we turned into Shelburne river at just gone 1600hrs.

It’s quite a long way up the river to Shelburne town [Ed: about 8nm in fact] and we spent most of the next 2 ½ hours ghosting up the river which was a very satisfactory end to the 71 mile passage.

Anchored off Shelburne

We finally anchored off Shelburne Yacht Club at 1900hrs and over an evening glass of wine checked the weather for the morning.  Our visit to Shelburne was intended to be a quick overnight pit-stop to get food and fuel. However, we debated whether or not we would need a stay slightly longer stay: the weather was just not playing fair for our plan to sail around into the Bay of Fundy to go whale watching.  The forecast had strong enough northerly and northeasterly winds that moving ourselves north into the Bay of Fundy was potentially going to be quite unpleasant.

My iPad had continued to play up and so whilst that whirred away with a tedious reload of all of its software. We considered our options.  With the forecast wind the most sensible option was to forget moving north to Campobello Island (New Brunswick, Canada) and Easport (Maine, USA) and instead take the weather window to head west across to Bar Harbour, Maine, the nearest port where we could check into the USA. However, that would probably mean missing out on seeing whales up close and Nicky was very keen to do that.  Time for a bit of a think (and a bit of claret to help the grey cells come up with a solution).

Shelburne, NS, Canada