We set sail on my birthday Saturday September 13th, it was a sunny beautiful day. The wind was pushing us onto the Eric Tabarly docks of the Ecole Municipale de Voile de Saint-Pierre where we had stayed for 10 blissful days. With the main up we pushed the boat back to the end of the dock and let the transom fall back as we pushed the bow into the wind. Jay was already at the helm by the time I jumped on deck, almost being left behind. We tacked out of the harbor and no sooner that we had set our port tack towards our destination 120˙ E by SE, that Jay had turned on Gma, our new autopilot. We named it after Jay’s mom, Grandma Carolyn, who kindly donated it to our cause. We did a dock-side-calibration and now it worked perfectly, our life aboard has changed. From one sail to the next we were no longer slaves to Messenger’s tiller. I had a perfect birthday sail. After some 65 nautical miles we arrived to Newfoundland where we tacked up a small fiord until the very end and anchored in a protected area with good holding to await a depression to blow over. We stayed there for 30 hrs, the girls made brownies and we feasted on a delicious pork stew that Jay had made in the crock-pot throughout the night before we left. We had a lovely private party while the wind howled outside, we read books, did art projects, listened to The Savage Sea on tape and recorded on our own voices on tape as well as listened to previous ones, even to some before Caribe was born, with Sol and Luna’s baby voices. On Monday morning after breakfast we lifted our 2 anchors and began our ascent to Saint John. As soon as we reached the mouth of the fiord, the calm flat water we had been cruising down on turned into a washing machine, we had not given the seas enough time to calm down and pretty quickly we started to “fall” in order Sol, Caribe, Mami and Luna. Either the North Atlantic is very different than the Caribbean or our 2 year stop has made us start all over, either way the second leg wasn’t as fun as the first but thanks to Jay and Gma we arrived in Saint John in close to 30 hrs. The entrance, referred to here as the narrows, was spectacular, it reminded us of other narrow entrances we have had to sail into: Saint George in Bermuda, the narrowest and Santiago de Cuba, the most beautiful. As usual, we had to tack up into it, but the maneuver makes it the most exciting and interesting. We then put the main down and drifted/sculled right into the public dock. A very strange and industrial port, with no facilities for mariners but very interesting shops and eccentric locals.
This is the most North Eastern point of the continent, the furthest we can go on short passages before heading into the unknown deep blue. We will spend less than a week here, there seams to be a good window we are studying and we might make the jump next week.
Next stop ICELAND! Just the sound of it is grand.
