Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia
May 30, 2011
We’ve been making tracks as much as possible and when a weather window opened to head North, we took it. Cape May to Block Island. Block Island to Martha’s Vineyard with a terrific sail down Vineyard sound. Topped 7.5 knots, which is about as fast as we’ll go.
A few days hanging out in Vineyard Haven and then the forecast we’d been waiting for: winds light and variable swinging to the east and then south. Waking to fog we took one last walk ashore and then motored out of Vineyard Haven Harbor.
Fog. It can be a light haze that paints everything with an otherworldly brush or it can be so thick you can’t see the bow from the cockpit. On our 5 day passage from Martha’s Vineyard to St. Peter’s Canal on Cape Breton we saw it all! I saw the stars for about 30 minutes on my first night watch but that was it.
You start to feel as if you're in a cocoon. A turtle with an atmospheric shell that moves along with us. Everything outside the shell is muffled or non-existant. It starts to play with your mind after a while. You can’t really tell where the horizon line is. But radar makes it a lot less stressful today. Russ’ family has stories of sailing circles around a buoy for hours until the fog lifted a bit. They weren’t sure which #1 buoy it was and weren’t about to sail blindly on. They aren’t the only sailors with stories like that.
But for us sailing in fog means keeping an eye on the radar and an ear on deck. We never saw anything until we were off Cape Breton but we did hear one fishing boat and saw numerous ones on radar.
No comments:
Post a Comment