I arrived in Halifax on Monday September 29th and stayed at his gorgeous home in the beautiful Annapolis Valley for several days as we prepared the boat for the upcoming trip. Our plans were to sail down the coast of Nova Scotia and cross the Bay of Fundy to Maine. In our previous trips we had never sailed down the Maine coast so this seemed like a great opportunity to leisurely explore coastal Maine.
After preparation our plans were to set sail Friday night and spend two nights sailing to Bar Harbor Maine. If you are an experienced sailor, one of the rules is to wait for a good weather window. The marine weather report for Friday night and Saturday was for winds of 25 to 30 knots and 10 to 15 foot waves....so guess what we did....stayed on the boat at the marina and hoped Sunday would be better.
In the meantime the Town of Mahone Bay was having their annual Scarecrow festival. All the businesses and homes on the Main Street have figures dressed in all sorts of exotic costumes on their front lawns. Even though it was cold and rainy there were huge numbers of visitors.
Sunday started out with heavy rain, fog and high winds so we just hunkered down for the day thinking we would probably set out on Monday. About 4:00 in the afternoon the weather window started to look more promising so we decided we would head out. After getting everything ready we left the dock at 5:30 heading for Bar Harbor, Maine. What this meant was a 90 mile trip down the coast of Nova Scotia and then rounding Nova Scotia and sailing a 120 mile stretch across the Bay of Fundy to Maine.
Everything was going well for the first two hours until it got dark and we found that our red/green navigation lights weren't working. We kicked ourselves for not checking this before we left but what to do....head back or try to improvise. This is where I am glad to be sailing with John, he always seems to come up with great solutions to problems. So he was able to rewire the lights and all was well again....anyway for a while. I think what John and I are finding is that as soon you solve one problem another one pops up.
The winds were blowing at about 20 knots but we were doing well so John took the first watch of 4 hours so I went off to bed. It wasn't very long before I was rudely awakened with John shrieking we've got a problem...get up and help. Apparently one of our battens had ripped from the sail. So we were able to retrieve it and back to bed I went. You guessed it after about another hour of sleep John was bothering me again...this time it was a little bit more serious...the main sail had ripped up at the top so we had to get it down and stowed. We got the foresail up and the motor going and continued
on our way. We were still only about 30 miles from our start. So back to bed I went....but by this time I couldn't sleep. So after tossing and turning I finally got to sleep. John being John decided to stay on watch for longer than his turn so I didn't have to start my watch until just before the sun came up.
In the meantime John got on the sat phone and asked Dixie to find someone who could fix our ripped mainsail. One of Dixie's many, many great attributes is she is able to research and find the best person who could solve our problem and as usual she found a sailmaker who could repair our sail as soon as we could bring it to him.
The rest of our trip to Maine was pretty uneventful....the winds died to nothing so we motored on with incredible sunsets (add pictures here!) and under clear sky's and a full moon. We arrived at Bar Harbor at 8:30 am Monday morning and quickly cleared Customs.
Bar Harbor Maine is a real tourist town. The big event this time of year is the people coming to see the fall colors of the trees. When we arrived there was a huge Princess Cruises ship disgorging 3000 bodies into the town. It was hard to walk down the streets there were so many bodies. Being purist sailors we turned up our noses at this nuisance!!! In the meantime ((I like that phrase) Dixie and a friend were driving on their way to meet us and take the sails to our sailmaker who is a couple of hours away. This may sound like I'm getting old and giving too much detail but if you are interested (even if you are not!) we went out to dinner on the early bird special and had a lobster dinner for $19.
There are many lobster fishermen here and the price of selling their lobster has been very low. Last year they were getting only $2.20/lb but this year it has gone up to $5.00/lb. I forgot to mention that on coming into Bar Harbor for 20 miles out there are lobster traps with their floating buoys everywhere. One has to keep a constant lookout for the buoys and man oeuvre around them so you don't hook one on your prop. John is not too impressed with all these tiny bobbing floats!
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