September 2008

September came into Havre-Aubert, Quebec with a roar. It blew 30-35 knots all night. Despite being well sheltered, wavelets were crashing so loudly against Windsong’s bow that I had to move to the main salon to get some sleep.

September 2^nd was my first real day of freedom. At home everyone was going back to school and here I was in this sandy little archipelago in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 1 year off: 1/5th of my salary for 4 years. Boat and accessories: Don’t ask! Not having to go back to school in September: Priceless!

The chocolatier was closed for the season, so I could not celebrate with handmade chocolates. Instead, I took the dinghy across the bay to look for the singing sands. Apparently, the grains are so round that the sand squeaks when you walk on it. The beach was very gradual. I had to drag the dinghy the last hundred feet through the shallows. The sand didn’t squeak. I walked barefoot down the beach anyways, and came across a gravel road leading to a parking lot. There was a board walk from the parking lot doing over the sand dunes to the beach on the ocean side of the tombolo (sand spit connecting two islands). Maybe that was were I would find my singing sand. It was quite a walk back to the dinghy for my shoes so I headed over the gravel barefoot. Ooch, ouch, eech! Sure enough, when I got there, the sand squeaked under my aching feet. Ooch, ouch, eech! Back down the gravel road to the dinghy. Remember all those shallows I dragged the dinghy through? The tide had gone out. The dinghy was now stranded 100 feet from the water. Now it was:

As I dragged the dinghy 100 feet over the beach, and another 200 yards until the water was deep enough to float it. Always an adventure!

In the afternoon, I had a beautiful close hauled sail to Cap-aux-Meules, the capital of the Magdalen Islands, where I picked up a dock across from the ferry to Montreal. The next morning I grabbed a jerry can and went searching for diesel. I found the gas station, but the diesel pump was broken. I walked to where I thought the next gas station was. It turned out to be the gas company’s office. I stopped to curse and figure what to do next. A car slowed down and a beautiful French Canadian fashion designer rolled down her window to ask me if I could use some help. She drove me around for half of the morning getting fuel and the best local bread and cheese. I’ve never been so thankful for a broken diesel pump!

My last stop in the Magdalens was La Pointe de la Grand-Entrée. Many of the twelve islands are connected by not one, but two tombolos enclosing a lagoon. Grand Entree was about the only place where a sailboat can enter one of the lagoons and anchor for the night. While I was there, I visited the sealing museum. The Magdalen Islands are the centre of the controversial Canadian seal hunt. It gained international attention when some marketing genius at Tourism Quebec released a video celebrating the pioneering spirit of the men who brave the ice and the elements to club defenceless baby seals in the head. Despite international outcry and boycotts on Canadian fishery products and furs, the hunt is continuing. The Madelinots are very passionate about it. Everywhere in the museum it was "Foque this!" and "Foque that!"

It howled all night again. I think someone was telling me it was time to head south. I had a nice broad reach for the morning as I sailed back to Cape Breton. The wind died in the afternoon and I motored into Neil’s Harbour in a glassy calm. I was too tired to continue to Sidney and I knew that I was going to regret stopping. Sure enough I spent the next morning pounding into 15-20 knot winds.

I arrived in Sydney just in time for the fishing boat races. I had always imagined fishing boats to be slow displacement trawlers. Not at all. The standard vessel in the races had a 700 hp diesel and could easily pick up and plane. The winner was a 1000 hp aluminum jet boat. Yes, you read that right. There are jet powered fishing boats.

My five days in Sydney were spent installing a new alternator and topping lift, doing some varnishing, and trying unsuccessfully to fix the masthead light. I also finally epoxied Windsong’s port handrail back together. It was broken back in July on my first attempt to cross the Cabot Straight to St. Pierre with my father.

Spot took the port time as an opportunity to prove that she could handle shore leave responsibly. She explored every boat in the harbour and crawled through every open hatchway. She even slept on a couple of other boats for a few hours. But she always came back.

September 12^th I set sail for Louisbourg. Tourist season was over and the place was ghostly quiet. It was difficult to believe that this was the fourth busiest harbour in North America before being supplanted by Halifax. I toured the reconstruction of the fortress. After the British conquered the fortress for the second time in 1758, they completely levelled the place so that they would not have to conquer it a third time. In 1961 the Parks Canada began a two decade project to reconstruct one quarter of the fortress as a time capsule of life in 18^th century Île Royale (as the French called Cape Breton Island) complete with historical re-enactors in period dress.

Louisbourg was also the site of Canada’s first lighthouse, built by the French in 1733. It fell into disrepair after the final siege of the fortress. And in 1842, a second light was built in the same location. The second lighthouse was destroyed by fire in 1923 and replaced by today’s lighthouse. The foundations of the first two are still visible as monuments to those early sentinels.

Spot was granted shore leave in Louisbourg. She spent her time exploring the inner structure of the wharf. This became a problem in the morning when it was time to leave. I forgot to put the hatch board in and she jumped into the wharf for her morning stroll. There was nothing to do but to sit back and enjoy my breakfast, since Spot was setting the time of sail. A couple from the adjacent RV park stopped by the wharf and I explained that I was waiting for my cat to come back. They said that they would keep an eye out for her. They knew what she looked like since they had seen her on deck while I was visiting the fortress.

Soon after they left, Spot returned and I cast off. The woman from the RV park came hurrying down the dock as I pulled away. I hollered that Spot had come back. She looked doubtful so I reached into the cabin and picked up Spot for her to see. She responded, "Oh gee! I wonder whose black and white cat my husband is guarding?"

The real Spot and I bashed into the wind all day to reach Glasgow Harbour, our first stop on the Nova Scotia mainland. Despite resealing the chain plates in Louisbourg we still had water leaking into the cabin.

Glasgow Harbour was a neat little wilderness anchorage recommended to me by the crew of Adagio back in Port aux Basques. I spent the next day there weathering out the tail end of Hurricane Ike. The storm formerly known as Ike was pretty tame. It blew 25-30 knots all day with no rain.

I left my anchorage the next morning with nothing out of the ordinary. I didn’t hit anything and the engine ran smooth as can be. I had great wind for sailing so I opened my sails and shut the engine down. In the afternoon, the wind died so I started up the engine. I put it in gear and... nothing. I tried reverse... nothing. Did my transmission let go? Did the shift cable snap? I opened the engine compartment to find that I was in gear and the shaft was spinning. I tried shifting and it shifted. The only remaining possibilities were that I had lost the prop or the prop was fouled and couldn't open. It had to be fouled. I dropped the sails, grabbed my mask and climbed down the stern ladder. The sight that I beheld explained things very clearly: there was the sheared off stump of the shaft where my propeller used to be.

I had to be seeing things. I stuck my face under again and sure enough, a broken shaft and my beautiful $1000 folding propeller gone into Davy Jones locker. I didn’t know that it was possible to shear a prop shaft and I never heard or felt anything happen!

I still had over 100 miles to go to get to Halifax for repairs. There were no two ways about it. I was now a real sailboat. I ghosted into Liscombe Harbour as the wind was going down with the sun. I dropped the sails and dropped the hook. Without the engine, there was nothing but hope to set the anchor with. Fortunately, the night was dead calm so I never had to test it.

It the morning it was still calm. One of the nice things about being a real sailboat is that you get to relax and have breakfast on your anchor in while you wait for the wind to come up. Come up it did, and I weighed anchor, unfurled the genny, and sailed off of my anchor like a real sailor.

The wind built to 15-20 knots right on the nose. There was no motor sailing into it this time. I beat back and forth into it struggling to keep the rail out of the water. Spot was deeply disturbed at every tack as she went from comfortably sleeping against the leeward combing to sliding across the cockpit from the now windward side. That was when I knew for sure that gentlemen and spotted cats don’t sail to weather.

As the light started to fail I made for Mushaboom Harbour. Once again I ghosted in as the wind went down with the sun. It was so dark and difficult to manoeuver under sail that I just dropped the hook in 30 feet of water in the middle of the bay. I paid out 140 feet of rode and let hope set the anchor again.

I had really lazy morning on September 18^th because the wind didn’t come up until 11 am. I spent the time on my cell phone trying to make arrangements. It turns out that two of my old sailing instructor friends from South Port, Craig and Heather Noakes, are living in Halifax and Craig works for the former C&C dealer. Craig arranged a haul out for me at the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron. Now all I had to do was get there.

The wind was on the nose again but at least it was a little lighter. In the afternoon there was a beautiful wind shift and I was able to beam reach at a rip roaring seven knots. There was foam everywhere and absolutely no drag from the prop! The wind once again went down with the sun and I found myself trying to beat into Halifax harbour as the water turned to glass. I dropped the engine onto the dinghy, strapped the dinghy along side and fired her up. After a couple of minutes of being reminded that a rip cord is a tool for developing a sailor’s arm and his vocabulary, Windsong was being pushed along by her little tug at 5 knots! By 11pm I was tied alongside at the Yacht Squadron.

Everything had been arranged and the next morning I was hauled out and sitting on a C&C 30 cradle. The shaft must have cracked last year when I hit the lobster pot. There was very little clean metal in the crack, so it had been that way for a while. The crack was inside the propeller hub, so there was no way of seeing it during the winter’s haul out. We had a new shaft made and found a used fixed three blade propeller to get me underway again. The thing had the same cross section as a bucket. I wondered if I would be able to sail at all with so much drag.

I was in Halifax for five days waiting for the shaft and prop. Craig and Heather entertained me for dinner one night at their home on St. Margaret’s Bay. I tried to keep myself entertained the rest of the time with frequent trips downtown in my dinghy. On one trip I came across the containership Millennium Falcon. I wonder how many times they are asked if Captain Solo is on board or "Is that really the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs?" I toured the Sackville, the last of the Corvettes that escorted the convoys across the Atlantic in World War II. She had been restored to her WWII configuration. The technology was so basic that she made Windsong look like Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon.

On another run, I came around the corner to see a ship tied up at the Cunard wharf. "Wow", I thought, "Someone still knows how to make a nice looking cruise ship." When I got closer I realized that no one makes ships that beautiful anymore. She was the QE II! Later that night, when I was coming down from touring the Citadel, I looked down George Street from the town clock to see the QE II being turned by two tugs right in front of downtown Halifax. What a sight!

September 25^th I was finally underway again. It was dead calm so I thoroughly enjoyed my new shaft and propeller as I motored to Lunenburg. I grabbed a mooring right across from the Bluenose II. Lunenburg was founded by German settlers in 1753 and is home to some of the craziest architecture this side of Germany. I followed the historic walk through town. I think the pièce de résistance had to be the Lunenburg Academy. It was built in 1894 on the location of the old town gallows, as part of Nova Scotia’s Academy system of secondary education. Today it remains in its full Victorian splendour as the local elementary school.

On my way to Lockeport the next day I saw one of the most unique lighthouses I have ever seen. The Little Hope Island light was first built in 1886 and most recently washed away in 2003. Perhaps the name came from the fact that there was little hope of building a permanent structure on the island. Somebody had a better idea. They hauled a Cape Islander fishing boat up onto the island and set her up with a light and solar panel. If she washes away they should find her still floating!

That afternoon, Environment Canada reported that Hurricane Kyle was coming my way. This wasn’t going to be a burned out extra-tropical storm. She was going to make landfall in Nova Scotia as a full fledged Hurricane with 45-60 knot winds. I decided that Shelburne would be a good place to be. The town was 10 miles in from the ocean located in what was reputed to be the third largest natural harbour in the world.

On the way there I passed a boat from Toronto going the other way. They radioed and asked if I had heard about the Hurricane. They didn’t think Shelburne was the place to be. I looked at the charts again. The problem with large harbours is that there can be a considerable fetch in the harbour itself. In this case there was a 5 mile southern fetch, and the storm was predicted to blow from the south. (Fetch is the distance the waves have to build up.) At the same time, the marina had a seawall on the south side so there shouldn’t be a problem. But now they had me worrying. I called my Dad. He looked at the charts and agreed with my assessment. I felt better but was still anxious.

When I arrived in Shelburne Hurricane preparations were underway, so I joined in the fun. They put me in a well on the inside pier deep behind the seawall and evacuated all of the boats off of the outer pier. The first order of business was to lash the main to the boom and unbend the genoa from the forestay. Once the genny was folded and stowed below decks, all of the canvas was removed and the flags and radar reflector were dropped to minimize windage. Then it was time to tie in. The dock was on the north side which would be to leeward during the storm. I was already tied to the dock with my standard bow line, stern line, and two springs. To starboard I ran a bow line to the dock and a second one to a piling that happened to be right next to the boat. I ran a stern line across to the next dock then took the line for my stern anchor and ran it all the way to the opposite corner of the marina. That was the nearest piling to weather of the stern. Since these were floating docks, tying to pilings was extremely important because the docks themselves could possibly break loose.

By 7pm on September 28 it was already blowing 25-40 knots. The surge was tripping around the break wall and making the boat pitch like a rocking horse. The forecast was now for Kyle’s eye to pass right over us. The yacht club members arrived and parked their cars facing the harbour so the headlights would illuminate their boats.

I always said that I would leave my boat and go ashore if she was going to be hit by a hurricane. If something goes wrong, there is little that you can do other than go down with the ship. Now that the situation was here, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. It was surprisingly comfortable in the cabin. Spot showed her concern by chasing her tail around the cabin, and I watched an old Doctor Who episode to try to keep my mind off of what was happening.

As the storm built, I kept looking out and checking on things. Eventually, I saw that my neighbours bow line had torn the cleat and the board it was bolted to clean off of the dock. I put on my foul weather jacket and life harness and went onto the dock to check it out. The dock was pitching so badly that I could hardly stand. By this point the waves were three feet high inside the marina. When I got to the broken part of the dock I realized that it was much worse than I had imagined. The dock was held to the piling by a chain that ran up and down the piling with the tide and was bolted to the dock on either side. The chain had torn the whole side off of the dock. There was also a hinge in the dock at the piling. The hinge had broken two 2X6's ripping the corner right off of one piece of the dock. All that was holding the dock to leeward of Windsong was one rapidly failing hinge.

As I was inspecting the damage one of the locals grabbed me by the shoulder. "Forget it buddy. There is nothing you can do. Come on ashore with us." As much as I hated leaving her, he was right. As I headed for shore with a lump in my throat, the tide was so high I had to walk downhill from the dock to the parking lot.

From there I surveyed the situation. Waves were now breaking over the break walls to windward and to leeward. The gas dock had floated off of its rails and down the harbour. The end of the outer pier had been shorn right off. Windsong’s dock was holding by a thread and there were three more boats tied to leeward of the broken section. What would happen if it let go? Five lines tied her to that broken section of dock. Three were attached to things that were still secure, including the pilings. Clearly the five lines would win, the other lines would snap and she would go with the dock. Would it simply drift to the leeward side of the basin? Windsong would be on the windward side of all the wreckage. Would the wreckage protect her from being dashed on the shore? Should I untie the lines attached to the broken dock? Then there would be nothing keeping her from going fore and aft. I would have to wait until the last second as the dock was letting go before she would be better off without those lines.

There was a bit of a lull and one of the locals grabbed some line from his truck and we ran down to the dock and started running lines from cleat to cleat across the break in the dock and from the piling to the cleats to leeward of it. After what my neighbour’s bow line had down to that cleat, I didn’t have a lot of faith in our solution. We went back to the shore to wait and see.

The water outside the basin was now white. The lone boat still out on a mooring was pitching like a broncho on steroids. The whole harbour was being tossed around as the docks undulated like snakes in hot coals. Foam poured over the break wall. Was this going to be the end of my trip? Was this going to be the end of the boat that had been with me since my childhood? Was the end product of the thousands of hours I have spent working on her going to be a pile of soggy fibreglass splinters?

Sirens started to wail as fire trucks descended on the commercial harbour. A fishing boat with a load of fish food for the aquiculture operation started taking on water. The fish food had clogged the pumps and she was now sinking. The police evacuated downtown as the waves started breaking over Dock Street. One of the locals got a call on his cell phone. His friend was in Yarmouth and the eye was passing over him. He was in an eerie calm as hell was breaking loose all around us. It was 9 pm and the storm was predicted to peak at 2 am. How much worse could this get? Already, the locals were telling me that they had never seen anything like this.

Fortunately, the forecast was as wrong about the peak of the storm as it was about where the eye would make landfall. By 10:30 things had calmed down enough that people started to go home. Somehow our lines had held the dock together and I still had a boat to go back to.

After the deepest sleep in ages, I reassembled the boat, and took on fuel, propane, and water. I loaded the dinghy onto to foredeck and made everything ready for my passage across the Gulf of Maine. I took one more tour of the town then made sure I was well rested. You could really tell that Shelburne was a loyalist town. It looked so much like I was already in New England.

Spot celebrated her last day in Canada by going for a swim. I have no idea what happened, but I found her cleaning herself on the deck of the clubhouse all wet and salty.

I departed on September 30^th for my longest passage of the trip so far. The crossing was to be about 48 hrs and 280 nm. I had done similar passages between South Port and Tobermory. The difference was that I would be 70 nm or 12 hours from shore for most of the trip. Also, this would be the first time I had ever sailed through the night alone.

The seas had died down nicely from the hurricane. In fact, the winds were dead calm and the seas glassy with a long swell. As the sun set, I motored through the German Bank fishing fleet. Once I had dodged the fishing boats, I sat back and sadly watched the Seal Island light blink out of sight. It would be my last sight of Canada for almost a year. Phosphorescence started to twinkle in my wake as the Milky Way stood out bright against the sky. I got out my binoculars and pointed them skyward. In the thick of the Milky Way, every binocular field showed a thousand points of light. Stars in the ocean and stars in the sky. Along the horizon there wasn’t a light as far as the eye could see. The only ones out there were Orion and me.