Days 35-36 — August 12 & 13 — Saint John NB to Digby NS & Lay Day There — 48 NM

 A beautiful bright sunny windy day for a great exciting fast passage.  We were off mooring from 6:40 a.m. to 2:04 p.m. Five miles to the Falls where we felt some churning; that short part of the passage was no job for autopilot.

This is the rock from upstream with the next photo after we passed around it.

Then three miles through Saint John Harbor to the Bay of Fundy. We gave a lot of room here to a two tug operation in pushing the freighter sideways to the dock.

Once out in the Bay it was a straight 35 NM shot, pretty much due south to Digby Gut. We put up the reefed main, then added the small jib, and a few minutes later, shook out the reef. With apparent wind wind about sixty degrees off the starboard bow in the teens, we made between six and eight knots. Exhilarating.

Digby Gut, like Plum Gut (and what could have been called Hellgate Gut) is where a lot of water flows fast. I had not read up on Digby Gut. It is the passage, about half a mile wide and quite deep enough through which Nova Scotia’s huge Annapolis Basin ebbs out into the Bay of Fundy. We seem to be headed toward the land at the left side of the photo, but the computer shows our Course Over the Ground, (different from heading due to tidal flow) shows us moving for the dead center of the Gut. The tide flowing out of the Gut slowed us from six knots to 1.6, in a field of whitecaps.

Once through the Gut we furled and motored the last four miles to the Royal Western Nova Scotia Yacht Club. It’s floating docks rise and fall thirty feet with the tide. An aluminum ramp descends from shore to the dock. The right half of the ramp consists of a flight if 47 aluminum stairs to make climbing easier. At high tide the ramp is level.

The Club gave is clear directions to one of its four moorings where we attached in eight feet of water at low. The electronic chart showed soundings of “3”. In New Brunswick and the US that means there is a depth of only three feet of depth at low tide at the location so marked. Every paper chart prints a notice whether it’s soundings data are in feet, meters or fathoms. The electronic chart did not tell is that it had switched from feet to meters in crossing the Bay of Fundy from one Canadian province to another.

Digby is renowned for its scallops and we arrived during the town’s 48th annual Scallop Days Festival. Grilled scallops in “scallop rolls” for only $10. And the three scallops in each roll were about 2.5 to 3” in diameter! And delicious.

We met our friends Greg and Wanda, who befriended and hosted  us in Halifax in 2017. They visited us in NY the next year and I sailed with Greg on Yves’ boat from Bermuda to Halifax the year after that. We had planned to visit them in their even more fabulous home on the east side of Nova Scotia on our way to Newfoundland. But that has to wait for a visit by air in the off season.

They drove across their island and we spent a day with them.

We shared a two bedroom suite at the Digby Pines golf resort with them (our first night off the boat after a few months aboard) had dinner and breakfast with them there, and they chauffeured us up the east coast of Nova Scotia to Port Royal and The Habitation, both museums on the Annapolis River. The exhibits taught of the turbulent period of 1604 and following (including what we call The French and Indian War) . Then Miq Maq (native Americans), the French, the British and the Acadians (North Americans who considered themselves French) were warring over possession of North America — and particularly over Nova Scotia. This area on Nova Scotia’s west coast was the site of Nova Scotia’s first capital. Museum activity was good because it rained most of the morning.  After lunch, they drove us back to Digby and headed across the province back to their home near Lunenburg. And at the end of the last day of the Scallop Days Festival, during a lightning and thunderstorm, the folks put on quite a show.

Greg told us of whale watching near Brier Island, down the coast a bit, a favorite spot for most every species of whales to cavort. Others said we should go as well. But in the end we decided to skip Brier Island and move on to Grand Manan tomorrow. First inserting it before Grand Manan would create a “V” shaped track that these old bones do not currently favor. Also there is uncertainty about where we could tie up and tales of strong currents. So we are off for Grand Manan at tomorrows high tide.