Days 15-17. July 2-4 -- Lunenberg to Halifax and Two Lay Days There -- 46.4 NM

It rained during the night and in the morning causing us to dither: whether or not to go. We did not leave until 11:30 when things brightened; but once out of the harbor a fog set in that stayed with us until we were well into the big wide bay leading to Halifax Harbor -- almost 40 miles of fog.

It is a very difficult thing to estimate visibility distance in fog but I estimate that it varied from slightly less than 1/4 mile in the good periods to as little as 150 yards at times. It is nerve wracking and draining. An analogy might be driving on an unlit road at night with a very dirty windshield. In that land analogy, you only have to keep the car on the road. At sea in fog, the road is rather wide but other boats can come at you from any direction. In clear weather one of us scans the horizon every few minutes. In fog, both of us are scanning constantly. Every hour I called on VHF: "Any boat! Any boat! This is the sailboat ILENE, sailing east about five miles west of Sambro Channel at seven knots. If you can hear this please call and we can switch to a different channel and communicate to avoid contact." No one answered. I suspect that no one was there but if they were we could not see them. Sambro Channel is about a thousand feet wide, cuts close to shore at the western headland of Halifax Bay and is well marked by sets of red and green buoys. We never saw a single buoy - except on our chart plotter. So I'm sure we passed some nice scenery and light houses, but sorry, no photos.

At the beginning I put up genoa, and then tried to put up main. The wrong order. I should follow Lene's advice more often. For most of the passage we sailed under main and small jib and made speed averaging eight knots with wind on our starboard quarter. But getting close to the channel where traffic, if any, would be goncested, we reduced sail in order to slow down for better visibility.

The problem with the passages we have made along the NS coast so far is that the mate is getting cold feet about going the last 160 miles to the Bras D'or Lakes, our destination, which everyone has told us we will love. I have planned four more day hops, each averaging about 40 miles, and each with a protected anchorage (but no towns, docks or restaurants) at its end. One problem is that on the way up the wind is at out backs, but coming home it will be in our faces. One potential solution to reduce the need to beat into the wind so much on the way home is to follow the lesson of the Caribbean: motor at night, when the winds calm down a lot. I think Lene will come around to continuing outbound for a few more days.

We had made reservations at the Armdale Yacht Club which is most of the way up the Northwest Arm of the harbor, on the west side of the city. Clubhouse from boat and vice versa:

Nice club, a lot like the Harlem in many ways. In the spring of 2016, when this blog announced that NS was our destination, I got a comment inviting us to the Armdale. It was not until we arrived that Wayne came over and admitted that he was our correspondent.

The downtown area is on the eastern side of the peninsula formed by the main harbor, the the NE and the Northwest Arm,

We were greeted by Beret, a friend who lives about 1.5 blocks from us in NY, and her friend, Michael, of Halifax. We had dinner with them at the Armview Diner, where I got my 2017 dose of  Poutine, a tasty filling Canadian delicacy designed to put cholesterol in your blood.

In the morning I finally fixed the pressure water problem. When I took the charcoal prefilter out of the water maker last fall, I did not tighten the cup that holds the filter tightly enough. Pressure water gurgled out. Tighten cup; problem solved. We also gave ILENE her first thorough cleaning since last fall. Can you eat off the floor? No, but close. Mike and Beret drove us for sightseein, (that's the USS Eisenhower across the harbor, in Dartmouth),

to refill our propane tank and for groceries. We invited them to dinner aboard ILENE, but they wanted to show us Mike's home and we had wine and cheese there, things developed with more food

and we adjourned the dinner aboard until the following night. Next day more errands: Laundromat, haircut and after returning to the boat, I did a bit of compounding and waxing. Admitting to my vanity: I did the part that guests would see when first entering the boat.
And our guest list grew: Greg and Wanda, sorry, I forgot to take their picture. They are friends of Michelle and Manu, who have been mentioned so often in this blog. We met M & M in St. Maarten, Greg and Wanda did in Guadeloupe. Manu gave us Greg's number and told us to look them up. They are sailors and boat owners and in fact Greg plans to sail, on a friend's big catamaran, not just north to the Bras D'or Lakes, but out of their northern exit and on to Newfoundland!  We had put our plates, bowls and wine glasses, other than four of each, into storage in the big lazarette several years ago. But with six of us, it was fun to break out the reserves. Greg and Wanda have a beautiful house with a dock in the harbor's upper basin where we may stay if we come back to Halifax.