|
Comments made by: Rolland Deb Jannelle Bianca Webmaster |
Log Book (september)• June-July08 • August08 • September08 • October08 • November08 • December08 • January09 • February09 • March09 • April09 • May09 • June09 • July09 • August09 September 1
Precipice is tied up and hooked up to power, so the dingy "Halocline" gives me my sailing fix. This is the Baddeck. NS lighthouse
Our dingy "Halocline" or Halo for short can get a little closer up than Precipice can under sail.
Jim and Kathy on Maggie come over and say goodbye to us the night before we depart for Newfoundland.
September 4-8 passage to newfoundland
This is the Great Bras d'Or Channel at 0530. We got up at 0400 for a 0500 departure. This is the first picture we could take in dim light. Up until this point we navigated by radar.
The Trans Canada Highway to Cape Breton Island
Goodbye, Nova Scotia you are beautiful and we will miss you.
Rainbow in the fog
Running up the coast of Nova Scotia. Our weather router told us to sit tight until three today and let a cold front pass over. We decide to sail up to Ingonish and check it out, one more Nova Scotia fix.
Ingonish, Nova Scotia. There was absolutely nobody here. Not a sound. Everything left open. Beautiful.
At exactly three a cold front passed over and the wind shifted to following winds from the West. Our weather router does this from Hawaii. Time to go. Goodbye, Nova Scotia, again.
Ingonish from a distance
Smooth seas and following winds. A good departure.
Nova Scotia disappears in our wake.
I was sitting in Nova Scotia looking at the weather map that had three low pressure systems in the North Atlantic, a upper level high, and a hurricane making its way up the coast. I wanted to get to the East coast of Newfoundland and needed a three day window. So far on my way up the St. Lawrence the Canadian weather service had a less than stellar track record predicting wind and waves. I decided to hire a weather router, Rick Shema, (
www.weatherguy.com ) Rick told me to sit tight for a week and I would have following winds and at least a three day window. So I enjoyed my week in the Bras d'Or Lakes, NS. The next week Rick gave me a rundown of what my next three days would hold by the hour, and the trip went exactly like he said, with wind shifts and wave conditions happening right when he predicted. Having a weather router looking at our route allowed us enjoy our trip, especially since the Canadian weather was giving us gloom and doom forecasts. I think that this happens because their forecasts cover such a large area they have to give the worst as if it could happen anywhere in the forecast area. Our weather service gives us a weather forecast built around our intended route and cruising speed. Rick, our weather guy, let us know that on the last day of our trip that we would likely get rained on. He was right. We got ten hours of the heaviest rain either of us had experienced. Six of those hours were in the dark. It was like standing underneath someone dumping a five gallon bucket of water on your head for five hours. When it is raining this hard our radar is essentially ineffective. I can still see land and miss things like islands and freighters, but buoys and other small ships become invisible. We could hardly see the front of our boat. I stood at the helm and Deb stood at the front of the boat and listened. At this point we had fired up the motor because winds had become light and shifty. I think all the weather was coming straight down. Deb and I wear decent quality foul weather gear, but you still end up feeling damp. Everything in the boat also got that special damp feeling. Fortunately both of us had good sea boots on, so our feet stayed dry and warm - very important. If your feet are dry and warm it seems the rest of you stays that way also. Unfortunately we have not found a good solution for our hands.
My hands after a day in the rain at the helm.
Every ten minutes or so I would call out our position on the Radio, and eventually we got within range of St. Johns, Newfoundland harbor control and asked them if anyone else was out there. They didn't say these exact words, but the tone of voice said "no one else is out here, you nut." We made the narrows of St. John's harbor at about midnight. Pat Collins of The Artful Dodger was waiting for us, and when we got in the harbor he contacted us by radio and flashed his car headlights to let us know where to go. When you enter an unfamiliar harbor at night and you are chilled, tired, and disoriented this is very very nice. Pat then guided us to tie up to a tour boat owned by a friend of his and let us get some rest. Thank you very very much Patrick for staying up so late and guiding us in. Our 360 nautical mile passage took us just under 80 hours. We averaged 4.5 kts and only motored for about 8 of the 80 hours. Most of all, we enjoyed it. We had made it to Newfoundland. Three months, three thousand miles, and ten years of planning. Precipice Rules.
Precipice in Newfoundland.
It was worth it.
September 8
The business end of a fishing vessel
St Johns Harbor is smelly. It is smelly because of what the locals call "the bubbler". The bubbler is from nearly raw sewage from the entire town that is dumped into the harbor. Raw as in turds floating by. The town is building a new treatment plant to remedy this situation, but the harbor is disgusting. We were a little tired today, so we slept in until 8 AM and then went out for breakfast - a rare occurrence in the Trowbridge household. After breakfast we walked to the info center. Here we had our first conversation with a true Newfie. We discovered that Newfies speak neither of the official Canadian languages. The language they speak is a mix of British, French, and Irish mixed together. Our tired minds were having a little difficulty sorting out the information lady's speech. She was great though, by far the best info center employee we had run into yet. Typical Information Booth Employee: 1. Bored 2. Retired or really old and discovering that having to work because the pension ran out makes you grumpy. 3. Not really in tune with the area they live in because they think it is 1964. 4. Sick and tired of visitors 5. Out of crucial things like maps 6. Afraid of telling you what they think about something, because everything is supposed to be great Our information booth employee Donna Bishop: 1. Really excited about life 2. Really old, but infectively alive and spry (not adobe spry you geek) 3. Knows just about everything and everybody and is up to date on the area as it is today. 4. Loves visitors, even us, and spent about 45 minutes getting us up to date on everything St. John's. 5. Gave us her own personal road map and marked it up with the location of everything we could think of. 6. Had no problem telling us to avoid a bad places even though their flyers where in the rack. Thanks Donna.
Too bad Donna doesn't work for immigration.
St Johns is a really cool town, if you get away from the harbor. We spent the morning getting bus passes, going to government offices, learning about schools, and walking on the earth. High tide was at noon, and our next stop - Quidi Vidi - requires heigh tide for entry with deep draft vessels like ours. So we cast our lines off and after getting permission from Harbor control left the bubbler behind. We sailed right out into three meter (9-12 Feet) ocean swells. The entrance of Quidi Vidi (pronounced "Kiddy Viddy" by the locals) would disappear and reappear as we went up and down the swells. When we actually got to the entrance it was hard to believe boats used it as an entrance, but trusting in Pats advice we plunged through into the best protected harbor I have ever seen. A narrow entrance that snakes through two bends surrounded by 100 foot tall walls of solid rock. Hard to get more protected than that. We immediately were welcomed home.
The entrance to Quidi Vidi, otherwise known as "the gut"
This is not what you normally would take a boat into unless you were born here and knew exactly what to expect.
Big Nasty Pointy Rocks with current pushing us around - I put it at full throttle to maintain steerage.
Some more Big Nasty Pointed Rocks in a narrow passage with current
We made it.
Quidi Vidi Brewery, our home for the winter and home of the best beer in Newfoundland. The month of September turned out to be a very busy month. We have tied up here for the winter, we hope. Jannelle and Bianca have been enrolled in a local school, Bishop Feild. The school had no problem welcoming our kids in, but we ran into a small snag when it came time for the needles, needles being what they call immunization shots. The school nurse called immigration to find out how she should deal with a visitor who doesn't have a medical number, and immigration came knocking on our door. Apparently you are not supposed to enroll your children in school until you have a work permit. The immigration officer asked me why I didn't call him first and I laughed at him. I told him that I had visited his office and they had sent me to another office on the other side of town. After waiting in line at that office, they pointed me to a computer hooked up to something called "the internet" in the waiting room I could use to find the information I needed. The immigration officer who visited my boat didn't find this humorous, so I told him that I was trying my best to follow the rules and since he was here I asked, "What should I do?". He didn't have an answer. They gave me a number to call and I called it for four days leaving messages without getting an answer back. A week later an enforcement officer called and scheduled an appointment for the next week. That meeting was just a fact finding meeting and we still haven't gotten an answer if our girls can attend school, but they are still going. We don't want to break any rules, we just want to winter here and work if they will let us. Contact with immigration after the boat visit has been friendly and helpful, though, and we feel that they are doing their best to figure out to do with a couple of Americans living on their boat with kids. Not the normal route. Worst case scenario we will have to pull our children out of school and not get jobs. Best case scenario, we both get work permits and the girls stay in school. What usually happens with these things is something in the middle.
This picture is for you Rick, we finally got around to getting the paper off the plastic you so generously gave us for our companionway. It has made a HUGE light difference in the interior of our boat now that we have to keep the companionway closed since it is cold.
This is the view of the ocean from the hill behind our Boat.
The girls in front of Bishop Feild school on their first day. The school is over 120 years old, and this building was built in the 1920's
Marble and Oak. They don't build them like this anymore.
My favorite car in the Rally, one of the first 12 mini's - made by hand. Unfortunately this car was totaled in the race and required the driver to be cut out with the jaws of life.
I spent a couple of days at an auto shop in St. John's getting checked out for a possible job and got an offer to be a judge for a local auto rally. I didn't realize what a big deal this was for the area until the TV Crews showed up. (Note to immigration: I didn't get paid or take the place of someone who would have gotten paid. This was volunteer time.) My job was to make sure that each car had the required roll bars, safety helmets, fire suits, fire extinguishers, and tow points. The only one that caused trouble for the teams was the tow points, and I ended up making one team drill a hole in the back of their car to attach a tow hook. Something they were not happy about. This whole day was kind of surreal for me because just six days earlier I was sailing out in the open North Atlantic.
There were several lotus there.
The token Bentley
A Jaguar. My Dad used to own one of these. He sold it when I was 15. Go figure. His had wire rims that he paid me .50 each to clean and they took and hour each to clean.
The new minis aren't the same. The team that drove this car had MINI emblazoned on their suits. Hmmm.
The amount of work that went into building up this interior is beyond words. You wouldn't get it unless you tried it yourself.
I have worked on cars for 20 years, and I have never been a gear head. I used to enjoy working on my own car, but that ended when a certain family member t-boned a station wagon with my beloved Toyota Supra "Lady". Ever since then, after work, I would be glad to never see another car. The last three years of my work in the States, I rode my bike or the bus to work. Cars are evil devices that suck peoples savings and our environment in one fell swoop. You know how much progress cars have made in the last 20 years? Not very much. Auto manufacturers have lost their soul. So if you are thinking that I was geeking out looking at all these cars you have got me wrong. The people who worked on the cars were much more interesting than the cars themselves. When I am looking at this interior, I am looking at someone's passion for life and how their mind works.
This picture is for DAN who has trouble visualizing the 100 foot tall wall of stone next to our boat. I think he has trouble with these things because he is a surveyor.
This is Ed. Ed and his wife Joan take good care of us. Here he is filleting cod for us. Yum.
Deb and I getting ready to drill a crucial hole in our boat for our self steering gear.
One of the things we get asked is what we do with all our time. This question is only asked by non-cruisers. Everything on a boat takes at least four times as long to accomplish compared to life on shore, and a boat has a never ending list of things that need to be accomplished every week. One of the major projects that we tackled was installing a Cape Horn wind vane. We did it in less than 8 hours. Drilling holes in boats is not something I like to do.
Here Bianca helps me sneak a backing plate down a tube with a piece of string.
This is a typical supper during the week with us. We have at least one neighborhood kid every night. The guy in the beard is Bjorn from Sweden. He crossed the North Atlantic this summer by way of the Faeroes, Iceland, and Greenland.
This is Bjorn from Sweden leaving to cross back over. We sailed out to see him off. He was back a week later with a broken running backstay. He is leaving his boat here and Jannelle is going to pump it out once or twice a week for him while he is in Sweden for the winter.
Eric Forsythe One of my sailing heroes is Eric Forsythe of the yacht Fiona I was surprised and delighted to find him tied up in St. Johns Harbor one Sunday afternoon. He welcomed us in and we spent a good chunk of the afternoon learning and trading stories. He has sailed over 200,000 miles, including two circumnavigations. His wife died during the first circumnavigation from cancer. Eric now cruises by advertising for crew online, which allows him to sail at age 76. His web site is worth the read.
We have been attending church at the Anglican Cathedral. Very high church with lots of liturgy and kneeling. Jannelle doesn't like it but Bianca does because she gets to attend Sunday School in the crypt.
Sunday School in the Crypt.
Our life has settled into a routine. School, projects, people, and exploring take up our time. Precipice has been our magic carpet into a new world and a new culture. We like our life we have made cruising, and it looks like we are going to do it for a while. As long as it is fun.
|
