Crew Log for June 11th – 12th, 2023
Trip Summary:
• Lunenburg to Halifax
• Trip Distance of 46.9 NM, Total Distance To-Date of 5,453.6 NM
The details of the story differ, depending on who is telling it, but I’ll try and stick to the facts.
Sometime around the fall of 2009, we started looking for our first keel boat. We had windsurfed for years, and had a couple of sailing dinghies, but otherwise knew nothing about boats, or what to look for. We looked at a few on line and roamed boat yards around Nova Scotia. We came very close to buying a C&C 25, at what would become our home port, but Judy refused to agree to buy a boat I couldn’t stand up in.
We finally discovered a Redwing 30 at the Armdale Yacht Club in Halifax. Built in 1970, she was dated, but had beautiful lines and appeared to be well maintained. She needed a few upgrades, but came with a diesel engine and a solid hull. We fell in love with the boat and bought it in January 2010. We were now back in Armdale, 14 years later, on a different boat. Back to the place where our sailings lives started.
It was an overcast day, the winds were 8 – 15 knots out of the west north-west. It was a quiet trip from Lunenburg to Halifax. We had to motor sail, most of the day, in a following sea.
We love sailing into Halifax. The entrance to the harbour is dramatic. A warship passed in front of us and a container ship was behind us. We made our way up “the Arm” past Point Pleasant Park, the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, past the Dingle and the Wagwoltic Club, beautiful homes (and some not so beautiful) and eventually to the Armdale Yacht Club.
Armdale is located on Melville Island at the end of the Northwest Arm in Halifax. The history of the club dates back to 1732. Originally it was a family estate and later a hospital, quarantine station, military prison, prisoner of war camp, recruit training station for the British Foreign Legion, ammunition depot, and eventually the Armdale Yacht Club. The members proudly boast that Armdale is the “blue collar” club, a dig to its more upscale neighbour, the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron.
We felt pretty special coming in here, as we passed our lines to Rob, the Past-Commodore and his Co-Captain, BettyAnn from sv Beyond. Not often we have the Club Executive greeting us. We first met Rob and BettyAnn in Annapolis, Maryland, and saw them again in Black Point in the Exumas. We had crossed paths several times again coming up the US east coast, until we parted ways in Staten Island. We made an immediate connection with them and were looking forward to seeing them again in our home Province.
The Greek Festival was on when we arrived and was in full swing just across the harbour from Armdale. As I made my way to the marina office, I could hear the music and could almost smell the food. We had planned to go with the crew from Beyond, but decided to join them for a "quieter" evening supper at the Club’s restaurant, Spinnakers.. It was a great opportunity to catch each other up on what’s been happening since we left Great Kills, almost a month earlier.
As we were finishing our meal, Judy’s nephew Matthew and wife Shima, arrived from the Annapolis Valley to welcome us home. It was a thoughtful gesture, as was the toy inflatable Matthew presented us with as a welcome home gift. Matthew and Shima have just moved back to Nova Scotia from Vancouver, BC, where Shima grew up. It was fun catching up on all the news and hearing about life in the valley.
The next morning was beautiful. Sunny and warm. It was one of those days, that if you had it in July or August you’d complain it was too hot, but not in June in Nova Scotia. It felt so good to open the boat and dry things out and shed a layer of clothing.
I will need to devote an entire blog post to the support we’ve received from a number of people. From our own family, to my sister-in-law Tracy and brother Bruce who stepped in to care for our Mom, to folks like Colin and Patty who, we proudly refer to as our trip mentors, to our extended family and friends, new and old, who reach our to us regularly to see “how we’re doing”. It is no exaggeration to say that none of this would have been possible, without a tremendous support network.
Judy’s cousin Neil and his wife Mercedes are among those that have been extremely good to us. Neil didn’t hesitate to come pick us up to take Judy and I out to deal with prescriptions, cell phones and anything else we needed to do. While all that was going on, Mercedes prepared a beautiful meal for us at their home in Hammonds Plains. It was all a bit surreal given they had been evacuated a week or so prior to our arrival, due to the wildfires. On our way back to the marina, we travelled through one of the sections affected by the fires and got a real sense of the severity of it.
We planned to head out the next morning, but before we did, Judy got invited to participate in the “Ladies Trivia Night” at Armdale, after which Rob and BettyAnn came to the boat to say goodbye. It has been hard to leave friends we have met along the way, but we are confident that we will cross paths again.
Whenever we were asked where we planned to stop in Nova Scotia on the way home, our answer always was, “…well, we’re not sure, but Tangier, Lunenburg, and Halifax for sure…”. Anyone who has followed these posts from the beginning will know why Tangier was on the top of that list.
But more about that, next time.
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