Crew Log for May 30th – June 07th, 2023
Trip Summary:
• York River – Clark’s Harbour, Nova Scotia
• Trip Distance of 245 NM, Total Distance To-Date of 5,301.7 NM
Despite having travelled over 5,000 nautical miles and spending almost 10 months on the water, we don’t tend to be impulsive risk takers, opting instead to follow a well thought out, planned course. All that was about to change.
Our Crew Log notes read, York River to Portland (scratch) / The Basin (scratch) / Shelburne (scratch) / Lunenburg (scratch) / Clark's Harbour. Gives you an idea of how things changed over the 2.5 days. Here's how it all started.
We woke to a cool, sunny day and the strong north easterlies were replaced with calmer southerlies, ideal conditions for heading up the Maine coast. Our plan for the day was to make a 45 nautical run to an anchorage just south of Portland, Maine. From there we would continue up the Maine coast until we had a good weather window to cross the Bay of Fundy to Nova Scotia.
The weather forecast was good for the next several days. However, things looked ugly 5 – 6 days from now, with almost of week of gale force north easterlies. It was looking like we’d be in Maine longer than we expected.
We had a strong current coming out of York River, creating a white water effect in the channel entrance. However, once we got out into the Atlantic, the choppy conditions calmed and were replaced by a gentle ocean swell. The winds were relatively light and, as predicted out of the south. It was a beautiful day. As we sailed along, we settled into our regular routine and headed towards Portland.
A few hours into our passage, Judy looked at me and said, “it is tempting to turn to starboard and head straight across to Nova Scotia and miss all the bad weather”. A crazy idea, given it was more than a 48 hour sail to Shelburne, Nova Scotia.
We are blessed with a great shore support network, who have been following our progress closely. I started mulling over Judy’s suggestion and shot a note off to Colin in Nova Scotia and Dino in New Brunswick, in addition to checking with our weather service consultant. I floated the “idea” past them. None of them thought the idea was crazy and all agreed we were looking at a “very, very nice” weather window to cross. So, with that, we pointed the bow towards Shelburne, Nova Scotia, and settled in for a 200 plus nautical mile passage that would take us 48 hours.
We had a reefed main and full jib and maintained between 5.5 and 6 knots. We finally had a beam reach, which we had been dreaming about for weeks. It was quite comfortable, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little anxious. There were no other boats within AIS range, but we were still seeing lobster pots 15 miles off the Maine coast in almost 300 feet of water.
Judy typically handles these passages far better than I do. And once again, as the sun set, I started to feel queasy. A short while later the barf fest started and I struggled for the next 12 hours. I eventually decided to head below and lie down on the floor in the middle of the boat. There is less motion there, which I was hoping would allow my stomach to settle. Luckily, I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep and woke feeling well enough to get a little food and ginger tea into me. Thankfully, Judy was a trooper through all this and looked after the boat.
We were making great progress, moving along at 6.5 knots, through the night and into the next morning. The swell was slightly on our aft quarter which made for some rolly conditions. The auto pilot struggled to maintain our course as we surfed down wind. Earlier in the evening it was making some disturbing noises and sometime during the night stopped working all together.
Given we were only about halfway, we had to hand steer for over 24 hours. There was no land within 100 miles of us in either direction so there were no visual cues to help us maintain our course. We'd have to rely completely on the compass, which sounds simple, but it is really easy to wander 15 – 20 degrees off course. The solution was to stare at the compass, with an occasion glace up at the radar and chartplotter to make sure nothing was ahead of us. We opted to do, 2 hour watches, which was exhausting enough.
Several miles off Nova Scotia, I radioed the Coast Guard to inform them of our arrival and ask about landing in Shelburne. They informed us that Shelburne and most of the surrounding harbours were closed due to the largest wildfire in Nova Scotia history. The affected area was over 24,000 hectares. As we rounded Cape Sable Island, the most southerly point in Nova Scotia, we decided to do another 120 nautical miles to Lunenberg since Shelburne wasn’t an option.
It is worth pointing out that the only reason we made the crossing at all, other than we had good weather, was that lobster season in Southwest Nova ended on May 31st. In any normal year, all the pots would have been out of the water and so we didn’t need to worry about dodging pots in the dark. Unbeknownst to us, because of the wildfires, fishermen were given a 3 day extension to get their gear out of the water. As luck, or bad luck, would have it, we drove between a lobster buoy and the leader line, snagging it around the keel. Before I could react, the line slipped off the keel, slid along the bottom of the boat, straight into our prop. We had several feet of heavy twisted line firmly attached. Oh, and it was 0100 hours. Pitch dark, several miles from shore and 43 hours into our crossing.
We radioed the Coast Guard, declared the boat disabled, and with no other boats around us, the Coast Guard Cutter, Chehabucto Bay was dispatched from the Rescue Center in Clark’s Harbour. The Chedabucto Bay crew hold the record in Canada for the most rescues. They were a calming presence, efficient and extremely professional. As we drew closer to Clark's Harbour, they side tied us to the cutter and gently placed us on the wall at 0730 hours, 6.5 hours after our initial call.
West Head is a busy working wharf. It was busier than usual this year given that fishermen from Shelburne and Port LaTour, who couldn’t unload their gear at their home ports, were using West Head as their temporary home. It was amazing to watch the efficiency of both the boat crews and the shore teams, unloading the traps.
I went to work immediately trying to sort out the issues with the auto pilot. Luckily it was just a broken belt and I fortunately had a spare on the boat. It was a quick fix and I was happy it wasn’t a more serious issue, since getting parts would have been a challenge.
The Coast Guard had arranged for a diver to come and check on Elizabeth M. A couple of hours after we arrived, Eric showed up. He geared up on the dock and before I could ask him if he needed any help, I heard a huge splash as he jumped off the dock, 10 feet down to the water with all his gear on. A short while later he emerged with the line and reported that everything else looked fine.
I came up off the boat, just as Eric stripped all his gear off on the dock and was proudly standing there buck naked. He said he was happy it was me and not Judy that caught him in the buff, although something tells me, modesty is not one of Eric’s personality traits.
Eric originally lived in Cape Sable, but grew tired of the persistent fog so he moved to Barrington. He was one of 5 siblings, raised by their mom, who in Eric’s words was “dirt poor”. Despite being the youngest, Eric became a “parent” to her as she got older. He had 5 kids, 2 of which lobster fish. He has 3 grandkids.
Despite having arrived at the end of a 5 month lobster fishing season, in a community dealing with the worst wildfire in Nova Scotia history, the reception we received was nothing sort of heart warming. Judy was looking around for someone to drive her into Barrington to get Canadian SIM cards for our phones. She asked Eric if the Coast Guard guys were around, to which he replied, “you kept them up all night, so they are all sleeping”. When she mentioned needing a ride, Eric points to himself and says, “I’m your man”. Robert, the Harbourmaster, contacted Canadian Customs, explained our situation, and provided us with the contact information for us to use when we got our cell phones straightened out. And all day long, random people would drop by and ask us if there was anything they could do for us.
Given we are in small town Nova Scotia, the phone store was at the back of the local Home hardware store. When Judy came back she said, “I love the smell of Home Hardware, it reminds me of ‘home’”. I also overheard her tell someone, “sailing is like a pregnancy…during the delivery you ask yourself why you did this…and then you have this cute little baby and it’s, oh…how sweet is this!”. While Clarke’s harbour wasn’t part of our plan, we were grateful to be safely tied up, amongst a community of generous people.
Later that afternoon we heard a friendly voice yelling down to us. It was Hilde, off of sv Kaizen, a 42 foot steel boat from Norway. Hilde, along with her partner Kim and their two children, ages 8 and 11, had left Norway last June, sailed to Grenada, up through the Caribbean and the east coast of the US. They were on their way back to Norway via Greenland and Iceland. Unfortunately, they developed engine trouble in Newport, Rhode Island and the closest place they could find a mechanic, that was able to do the work, was in St. Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia. Like us, they snagged a lobster pot and had to be towed into Clarke’s Harbour.
They had been here for almost a week. They were hoping the mechanic would drive down to troubleshoot their issues, but the highway was closed, preventing him to get there in any reasonable amount of time. They sadly were still there when we left, with no idea for how much longer it was going to take to repair their engine.
Anyone familiar with Cape Sable Island will know that it is a very remote place. There is a local grocery store and one restaurant about an hour’s walk down the road. There was also a fish and chips takeout right at the dock in West Head that we became regulars at. There’s not much else there, so most days were spent wandering around the docks talking to the locals.
I met Marty, a local fishermen, who had battled bone cancer several years ago. When I asked him about the fires, he said, “there is nothing that can’t be fixed or replaced…except your health. If something can be fixed with money, it isn’t really a problem”. He did acknowledge that the community has been turned upside down by the fire and that many people lost a lot.
Judy also met Dana, an 81 year old retired fishermen who has lived on Cape Sable Island his entire life. He had a 65 girlfriend who lived in Barrington, which is about has far as he travelled off the island. He seemed to be quite “fond” of Judy and it did occur to me that he might be looking for a new 65 year old girlfriend! Dana, like most people here, was very kind. He took us up to the grocery store and then drove us around the island and filled us in on all the local gossip and the history of the island.
We had left Maine on Tuesday and arrived here on Thursday. The forecasted northeasters hit us on Saturday with gale force winds and rain that persisted for several days. The temperature also dipped into the single digits and at one point I was convinced it was snowing. Needless to say, we didn’t venture too far off the boat.
Fortunately, Kim and Hilde were close by. We dropped over to their boat one night for some of Hilde’s buns, which in her words were, “just like cinnamon rolls, except they are not rolled, and they don’t have any cinnamon in them”. One other night Hilde came over to Elizabeth M for some “mommy time off the boat”. And, once the weather improved, we all walked to the Salt Banker Restaurant and had a family meal together, complete with a game of Bananagrams. It was fun getting to know them, regardless of the circumstances that brought us together.
As the weather improved, activity around the wharf started to pick up again. Several of the boats were transiting from lobster season to long lining season. I met the Captain of the Atlantic Triumph, who was getting ready to go fishing halibut. It would take them 5 days to get to the George’s Bank, they’d fish for 5 – 6 days and then steam back to Glace Bay to unload, before heading back out. He thought they’d be home in Clarke’s Harbour sometime in August. It boggled my mind to see the pile of gear that they planned to stuff in the boat, in addition to, 45,000 pounds of halibut and 25 tonnes of ice.
Before we left, I made one last visit to the Coast Guard office to thank them. When I apologised for dragging them out in the middle of the night, the CO of the Chedabucto Bay said the worst thing we could have done was to delay calling them. All too often people wait, and the situation generally gets worse. By far, most of their calls now are medical calls, where the crews have worked themselves into a state of exhaustion trying to deal with something they should have called the Coast Guard on, hours before.
We had left Maine a week ago. Never would we have guessed, when we made the impulsive decision to turn to starboard and head 250 miles to Nova Scotia, did we think we’d get snagged into Clark’s Harbour. However, there was a small part of us that was grateful we had the opportunity to visit this part of our home province. It is ruggedly beautiful and the people are generous. Pretty much like the rest of Nova Scotia. But, it was time to move on.
The winds had finally eased and swung around to the south. The forecast for the next several days looked good for getting up the shore. Despite reassurances from the Coast Guard and fishermen on the wharf that all the gear should be out of the water, we were nervous about travelling at night. Our plan was to do a couple of hops up the coast to Lunenburg, one of our favorite places to stop. However, our memories are short and we yet again make an impulsive choice that we hoped we won’t regret.
But more about that, next time.
Additional Photos:
Hi Al and Judy, that sounds like quite an adventure on the way home, glad everything turned out okay and that you had a safe passage.
Regards
Greg