New York to Lunenburg in 4 days

A few years ago I realized that besides day sailing I enjoy longer trips where the boat serves not only as a means of fun or transportation, but also as my home. Chartering is fun, but the boat feels more like a hotel room where you check in for a week and check out a week later. Salty Ginger was meant to be that home with sails that can take me, my family, and friends places when I started looking for an upgrade from our previous 30-footer Genie. Last year we made a few local trips, but mostly sailed in the New York harbor, but the dream of taking time to explore some parts of the world by sail is realized this year. I wanted to go some place remote, wild, the opposite of a busy city, the more permanent home. That is how Nova Scotia came up.

Last November I brought up the possibility of doing the trip to our friend AJ. His eyes lit up and then he said that his forefathers were one of the settling families of Lunenburg, so he will do everything he can to join me on the passage except that he needs to be back in the US for work. OK, we have one tentative crew. Mark helped me deliver SG from Annapolis last year, and also said that he'd be very happy to make the passage. Second crew. Viktor and I took two week-long classes last year, including a passage to Bermuda, and he was also interested. One more friend was interested, but then couldn't make the trip, so we had a crew of 4 solid sailors to get SG to Nova Scotia, and with AJ's "agenda" the port of entry was determined to be Lunenburg, a UNESCO heritage site, so clearly worth a visit.

Looking at the weather for the 550 mile passage, I saw that the winds are forecast to cooperate, perhaps on the fresh side for the start, but at least from a good direction. And surely, we will encounter fog in the Gulf of Maine and Nova Scotia coast, but we have a radar, so we should be all good for the scheduled July 1 departure.

As we left the docks of Gateway marina, it was partly cloudy, windy, and it was drizzling occasionally, and it was sunny. Very confusing. Once we were an hour or so east of the Breezy point, we were engulfed by fog. First it looked rather ok, perhaps half a mile visibility, but good enough to avoid fishing boats and hold our course. The wind was on our beam, we were doing 7 knots or better. I was quite tired from getting things buttoned up at work and preparing the voyage, so I went to take a nap. While it may seem that everything is quiet on a sailboat making steady progress on a course, the situation in the cabins is very different. Especially the forward cabin which is mine. Every wave is heard as it hits the hull. Any waves that splash over the deck are also heard as the water rustles down. Things move and make noise. Without being used to it, it's hard to fall asleep. 

I get woken up: "Andre, how do we turn on the radar?" Turns out that the fog got very dense and visibility was very low, maybe 50 meters. By that time we were a ways off from NY harbor, so the density of fishing boats was much lower, but still, it's nice to know who is around. GPS makes it easy to navigate, so we are covered on that part. AIS enables ships to let each other know the position and the course of the vessels in the immediate vicinity, but not all vessels carry AIS transponders, so seeing what is around is still very important to avoiding collisions at sea. The crew handled navigation admirably while the skipper was catching up on sleep.

When I woke up the fog was much thinner, and we could see the sun. No, we couldn't see more than half a mile in horizontal direction, but having a bimini (a cloth roof) was very welcome to shade us from the sunlight. We were making excellent progress under full sail, and by the time it got dark we were at the eastern part of Long Island, outside of reach of cell phone towers.

Windy conditions are great, except that one has to get used to them. That first day our diet consisted of water, saltine crackers, apples, and other simple things. Nobody wanted hot food, and I lost my breakfast to the fish. It seems to be the price that many people pay for enjoying sailing in open waters. Nobody was complaining, in fact everyone was having a blast.

We agreed to do 2 hour shifts with 6 hour off-period to get sleep. The shift schedule started at 20:00 and went until noon. During the day we ensured that at least one person was in charge of monitoring where we were going, but didn't stick to a rigid routine. Having a schedule is helpful. It ensures that everyone gets sleep and everyone gets to do their share of watch keeping. We did a free schedule on Around Long Island Regatta, and I think it works worse than a fixed schedule, especially on longer passages when people fall into a routine.

Right as I was staring my 20:00-22:00 shift we were visited by a pod of dolphins. They stayed with us for a few minutes showing off their agility and speed. Some breached, others came up very close to SG. It was a very welcome sight after a day of feeling rather crappy and nauseous.

Day 2 brought much lighter winds, so the 170 mile day that we had obviously could not be matched. We ended up motoring for some time, saw tide rips, saw water temperature go down from 18C to 13C, and even 11C at some point, but the fog was still there. Again, modern electronic systems were super helpful for identifying big ships and their course as we had to cross shipping lane leading into Boston. At times visibility was no more than 200m, but south of Nantucket we saw practically no vessels.

As we rounded Nantucket shoals, we pointed the bow to a location on the chart that warns large ships to stay away to avoid hitting the Atlantic right whale with the desire to actually see some whales. And we found whales! First we saw at least 3 whales who showed their tails, backs, and spouts. Then we saw what can only be called a spectacle: one whale showed his flipper, as if he were waving at us. Another whale fully breached. Backs and tails were too numerous to be counted.

Pretty much immediately after we passed the whales, a large pod of dolphins caught up with us. They followed SG for at least 10 minutes, coming up very close, swimming right under the hull, almost touching it with their dorsal fins. There were a number of adults and at least 3 babies who didn't seem to have trouble keeping up with our respectable speed of 7 knots. It was the best marine animal show I've ever witnessed. Truly spectacular!

Water temperature east of Nantucket is frigid. The lowest reading we saw was 11.5C, but over the banks further east it went up to 13C. Nevertheless, the night was fresh. Luckily, the wind was almost directly behind us, so that made the apparent wind (the wind we felt) less strong, and the night ended up being warmer than we initially expected. For dinner we had pasta mixed with tuna and tomato sauce. We also indulged in some wine since sailing was very smooth.

Day 3 brought more relaxing sailing. Not only did we have the wind filling our sails from the stern quarter, it was sunny and the visibility was measured in miles, not meters. We saw coastal fog far in the distance, but for us it was sunscreen time. The wind was still cold, so we folded the bimini to soak up some heat. At one point I was standing at the wheel in a light jacket feeling cold and right in front of me was Viktor lying on the settee in shorts and t-shirt feeling very comfortable and trying to read. Eventually he put the book down and said "reading is too much work." Such a contrast to our departure day!

Unfortunately, our luck for marine animals ran thin that day. For dinner we had rice, prepackaged Indian spinach and lentils. And everyone had appetite.

By the evening the winds were too light to make any progress so we started motoring. We didn't run the engine too fast to make things quieter and to conserve fuel. We were still making 5 knots, and of course in the direction where we wanted to go.

On the morning of Day 4 the wind started to pick up. And then we saw unmistakable whale spouts. We shut off the engine hoping to make ourselves less unattractive to the whales, but the trick didn't work. They went their ways. We also saw what we suspect was a sunfish. One of them escaped under water when it heard our engine. The second one we saw under sails, and approached it very close, but it didn't seem to care. Curious creatures.

Food ended up being a good part of the excitement for the day. We had eggs sunnyside for breakfast (somehow everyone was up at the same time), and borsch for late lunch/dinner. Hard life on the high seas.

By the evening we seemed to get weak cell phone signal, but couldn't really make use of it. Nevertheless, it was clear that we would be turning from deep water into Lunenburg harbor at around 2am. Mark and AJ took a long shift till midnight, and Viktor and I took over then.

When we were about 5 miles off the coast, we felt blasted with a smell of some sort of pine trees. It was an unmistakable smell of land. We had clear conditions, so we could see the buoys, but smelling land made it so much real. Later on we smelled mudflats, and later still manure. It's curious how after just a few days at sea our noses were extremely sensitive to land smells.

As we were pulling into the harbor we witnessed a fabulous sunrise. The gradation of gray and pink on the clouds was absolutely phenomenal. We had a hard time guessing where the sun was exactly, but the marvelous colors were breathtaking over the almost mirror-like surface of water with no wind.

As I'm still figuring out the internet situation, uploading more pictures is a bit difficult, especially as we took time to explore the bay while searching for puffins and seals. And I still haven't figured out a way to upload pictures from the Canon camera, so those will come later.