Quetzal had recently glided into Lunenburg Harbour under spinnaker, five days outbound from Bermuda. It was great to be back in one of my favorite Nova Scotia haunts, and time to get ­serious. Polar Sun, my friend Mark Synnott’s Stevens 47 cutter, was also in Lunenburg. Mark is a ­climber, professional adventurer and bestselling author. We had most recently sailed together in Grenada, and now he was also bound north, leading a National Geographic expedition through the Northwest Passage, hoping to find new evidence about the fate of British explorer Sir John Franklin. We gathered in Quetzal’s salon and chatted long into the night, discussing our preparations and aspirations for our upcoming voyages.

On June 15, Quetzal slipped her mooring and steamed into the fog. It was reassuring to have Alan, a dear friend from Lunenburg, back aboard. Ron, a Quetzal glutton who has crossed the Atlantic with me twice before, and Mark, a terrific shipmate from Montana, completed the crew. Our job was to sail to Newfoundland, where our Viking voyage would commence. However, our first landfall was fabled Sable Island, a crescent of shifting sands 90 miles south of eastern Nova Scotia. It’s notorious as the “graveyard of the Atlantic,” and more than 350 wrecks form a necklace of tragedy. It’s also home to an unlikely herd of 500 wild horses. It’s also not easy to visit, so when Alan arranged a coveted landing permit, we had to stop.  

After a two-day sail from Lunenburg, we dropped the hook just off Sable’s northern shore. We hailed the park authorities, launched the dinghy, and prepared for a beach landing. There are no harbors on Sable, and landings often go badly because of stealthy wave breaks. We were the first boat to arrive in 2022 and had been warned not to attempt to get ashore unless the conditions were favorable. It was calm and clear as I searched for a stretch of beach with a minimal break and then gunned our 6 hp Tohatsu. In my mind, we were marines storming a beach. As the dinghy plowed into soft sand, a modest wave plopped aboard. We struggled to jump out and haul the dink up the beach. Reality hit with the second, soaking wave. We were four post-middle-aged guys in an overloaded dinghy, but we were ashore on Sable Island.

The park rangers helped drag the dinghy to a spot beyond the reach of the tide. Trekking through sand and marram grass, we encountered the horses. Perched on a low dune near a freshwater pond, we observed an injured stallion fend off unwanted inquiries from a pair of frisky colts interested in his harem of mares. The once-proud stallion was limping badly, and Mark, a veterinarian, assured us his days were numbered. Parks Canada has a hands-off policy concerning all wildlife on Sable, where the horses, introduced in the 1700s, have thrived. Originally from Acadian stock, they have developed into a unique breed to withstand the harsh climate of the North Atlantic. As we made our way back to the beach, we encountered a plump of gray seals, and a few curious harbor seals, a mere fraction of the thousands of seals that breed on Sable.

With strong winds forecast by late the next day, we decided to cut short our visit and head for Newfoundland. After a breezy passage across the Grand Banks, we made landfall in St. John’s. We secured every fender we had and eased alongside an unfriendly wharf. Alan’s friend Mike Riley delivered two beefy 12-foot spruce sections that we later fashioned into ice poles. In the spirit of Viking plundering, we enjoyed great food, drinks and Irish music along George Street, whose claim to fame is having the most bars per square foot of any street in North America. Continuing north, we made landfalls in Trinity, Fogo and Twillingate before arriving in Lewisporte, a small town with the nicest marina in the Canadian north. 

The crew for the next leg, the challenging 1,800-mile, 18-day passage to Iceland by way of Labrador and Greenland, turned up on July 7. Scott, Antonio, Levi, Brian and Jeff had all sailed aboard Quetzal before, some many times and most across an ocean. After a dry run of stuffing ourselves into survival suits and a sobering safety briefing—falling overboard was a very bad idea—we shoved off for an overnight passage to L’Anse aux Meadows, the only documented Viking settlement in North America and a national historic site administered by Parks Canada.

We had icebergs on our minds. Environment Canada provides ice updates online, and I studied them daily. I also downloaded the app Iceberg Alley, which documents icebergs and whale sightings. There were reports of a few stray bergs along our route, and we kept a sharp lookout through the night. We didn’t see any icebergs, but a pod of minke whales escorted us around Cape Bauld at the tip of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula.

As the dinghy plowed into soft sand, a modest wave plopped aboard. Reality hit with the second, soaking wave. We were four post-middle-aged guys in an overloaded dinghy, but we were ashore on sable island.

We came alongside a new wharf at Garden Cove. Two local fishermen took our lines. They didn’t seem to mind the driving rain and near-freezing temperatures. When I told them that we were headed to the nearby park, one informed me, “You can’t walk there from here.” I was surprised because it was just over a mile away and I’d made the walk before. “Nope, can’t walk there. It’s too wet. But you can take Rabbit’s truck. Keys are on the dash.” 

The visitor center at L’Anse aux Meadows, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, details the Vinland voyages of the Vikings, who reached this faraway shore sometime around 1000 A.D., nearly 500 years before Columbus. Sagas, originally oral histories, tell the story of Leif Erikson’s voyage to Vinland. With a crew of 35, they departed Greenland and made their way north and west. Their first landfall, which Erikson dubbed Helluland, or place of stone, was likely somewhere on Baffin Island. It was a forbidding land, and they sailed on. Their next landfall, Markland, meaning wooded land, was probably along the Labrador coast, but they didn’t tarry and rode a favorable northeast wind farther south. Finally, they came to the shallow, rocky anchorage near today’s L’Anse aux Meadows and decided to make the grassy knoll overlooking the harbor the first European settlement in the New World.  

The term Vinland, or place of grapes, has historically been problematic. The ­sagas are clear that when Erikson sailed for Greenland the following spring, his cargo included grapes and vines. While it is unlikely that wild grapes have ever grown in Newfoundland, the Norse ­artifacts at L’Anse aux Meadows are indisputable evidence of a settlement dating from around 1000 A.D. First discovered by Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Anne Ingstad in 1960, these remains are of Norse-style sod buildings, including a forge and small shipyard. Artifacts include slag from forging, numerous iron nails used for shipbuilding, and more than 50 wrought-iron pieces. It is possible, or even probable, that Erikson’s landfall was farther south, and many historians now believe L’Anse aux Meadows may have been where his brother-in-law, Thorfinn Karlsefni, tried to establish a permanent settlement a few years later. Hiking around the respectfully restored site in a bone-chilling rain, I had deep respect for the men and women who sailed from Greenland in a low-slung boat, probably less than 60 feet long, with a single square sail and only their natural instincts to guide them.

That night, one of the local fishermen provided the crew with lobsters for a feast. Before we shoved off the next morning, Scott took a swim, an invigorating ritual he undertook at every landfall, even when we were surrounded by ice. We made our way across the Strait of Belle Isle and approached mainland Labrador. Fog closed in as we neared Battle Harbor, but, undeterred, we threaded our way through a maze of rocks, racing darkness to the wharf. 

Battle Harbor occupies a rocky outcropping that is steeped in history. A Marconi wireless tower was raised in 1904. Five years later, Robert Peary used the tower to telegraph news that he had reached the North Pole. Reporters from all over the world were dispatched to Battle Harbor, though today, significant historic and scientific research has concluded that he most likely did not reach the pole.  

I had deep respect for the men and women who sailed from greenland in a low-slung boat, probably less than 60 feet long, with a single square sail and only their natural instincts to guide them.

Continuing up the Labrador coast, we finally encountered an iceberg. It was a classic wedge berg, and we cautiously sailed toward it. I used my sextant to measure its altitude and the radar for a distance off reading. A quick calculation put the iceberg at more than 160 feet high and about 250 feet wide. We were in awe and shot photos from every angle, paying homage to the giant castaway from a distant glacier. Little did we know that a week later, we’d be routinely punching through ice-choked waters, casually dismissing isolated bergs like this one while searching for passages through sea ice. 

We anchored in Eagle Cove, a ­fishhook-­shaped harbor carved out of Hawk Island. This was genuine wilderness. We had been warned by veterans of Arctic travel to be on guard for polar bears, and some suggested that we carry a gun for protection. Instead, we carried bear banger cartridges and a pen launcher, which travels about 100 feet and then explodes with a mighty blast. It would certainly get a bear’s attention.

Scott and Brian were a long time ashore before I noticed them in a distant corner of the cove. When I retrieved them in the dinghy, there were shivering in their underpants. They had discovered a bed of mussels and braved frigid water to stuff their pants with hundreds of them for dinner. 

After a swift passage through a steep-sided strait intriguingly called Squasho Run, we made our way offshore. We timed our departure to catch strong but favorable winds on the back side of a deep low-pressure system, and to have as much daylight as possible to get beyond the numerous icebergs that Environment Canada’s weather and climate-change website assured me were hovering near the coast. The first 24 hours were rough as Quetzal ran before near-gale-force westerlies while being rocked by seas from every direction. Not for the first time, we came to appreciate the hard dodger and full enclosure that kept us dry and warm. A day later, conditions moderated, and soon we were under power gliding over quiet seas with a squadron of fulmars tracking our every course correction. On Day Four, 60 miles from land, we encountered many large icebergs. Then, through a clearing in the low clouds, Brian spotted the towering, snowcapped mountains of southwest Greenland. We were entering another world.

Icebergs come in different shapes and sizes. The big ones, which are masses of frozen fresh water, are generally easy to pick up on radar. Bergy bits, usually fragments of larger bergs, are 3 to 12 feet high and more worrisome to sailors, ­especially in bad visibility. Growlers, which occasionally hiss or growl as trapped air escapes, are 3 feet or less above the surface but can be deadly. They’re typically around 200 square feet in size but can weigh up to 1,000 tons. Imagine smashing into a growler at 6 knots.

With the sun shining, Levi launched his drone. He managed to land it on deck while we sailed between bergs. In addition to beautiful photos, it was also nice to get a view of what lay ahead. The wind freshened as we made our approach. We tried to stay upwind of the larger bergs, knowing that bergy bits and growlers were likely to be on the lee side. We slipped around several growlers, and one small berg that tried to block the entrance to the town of Qaqortoq. Its harbor was crowded with local boats, so we tied up alongside the commercial dock. Later, we moved across the harbor to an open fishing dock. Finding secure dockage in Greenland requires that you be ready to move when a commercial ship arrives and that you have long lines with chafe gear and heavy-duty fenders.  

Qaqortoq, the largest town in ­southwest Greenland, is also close to the site of the Vikings’ original Eastern Settlement. Founded by Erik the Red, Leif’s father, around 980 A.D., the ­settlement remained vital into the 14th century. Several Norse remains are visible in nearby fjords. We took on provisions, topped off our fuel and, surprisingly, had a delicious Thai meal in a small restaurant in the port.  

In Greenland, I shifted my attention to the excellent daily ice reports provided by polarportal.dk, a Danish ice- and climate-­monitoring institute. Our intended route was to follow an inside passage south to Nanortalik, then enter Prince Christian Sound. This spectacular 70-mile passage north of storm-ridden Cape Farewell provides a protected channel to the Irminger Sea and the east coast of Greenland. Protected, that is, if you can get through the ice. We were now worried about sea ice, or storis, which is frozen seawater that forms quickly and disappears just as quickly. Driven by wind, current and bathymetry, storis can completely block a passage. Looking ahead a week, our planned exit would likely be blocked by ice.  

High-latitude sailing and planning don’t mix. You take things a day, or even an hour, at a time, then react to drastic changes in weather and ice conditions. We had a hard upwind slog from Qaqortoq, tacking and motorsailing to stay clear of hundreds of large icebergs and countless smaller ones before finding an open spot along the wharf in Nanortalik. It’s a quiet village whose name translates to “place of polar bears.” The protected harbor ­provided a respite from the strong winds. 

The following day, July 19, we picked our way through minimal sea ice and entered the Ikerasassuaq Strait. Gale-force north winds were forecast, so we made our way to a landlocked bay, Paakitsuarssuaq, and conned our way past rocks and ice into the stunning anchorage.

The passage here is, simply, ­magnificent. Sheer-sided 6,000-foot mountains explode from the water’s edge, and several ­glaciers reach down to the sea, calving off bergs and bergy bits. It was calm, and we motored most of the way. Several times we slowed to a crawl, usually just downstream of a glacier, as the channel became choked with ice. Brian and Jeff manned the bow all day long, guiding us through narrow openings and using the poles to shove growlers out of our way. We nosed up to Kangerdluk Glacier and let Quetzal drift. Levi and I stayed aboard, and once again the drone was aloft. The crew took the dinghy to the foot of the glacier and snagged a few nice chunks of ice for captain’s hour.  

Luckily, the strong winds of the night before had pushed the storis south, leaving a clear path out. That night was the most stressful of the summer as Quetzal sailed toward Iceland in fog, gusty winds and ice-strewn waters. Jeff was a champion, manning the bow for hours in the dark despite the cold, wet conditions. We monitored the radar and became adept at picking up even very small bergs. It was an incredible relief to finally gain sea room, and the five-day 600-mile passage to Hafnarfjordur, Iceland, was surprisingly smooth. 

Quetzal and I took a well-earned break in Iceland. My wife, Tadji, my daughter, Narianna, and her fiance, Steven, flew in, and we toured the island by car. Iceland is a rugged land of fire and ice. The Fagradasfjall volcanic eruption was ­greeted with nonchalance by locals and intrigue by visitors. Nari, Steven and I hiked 6 miles each way on a rough trail to get a firsthand look at molten lava. Quetzal was treated well by the Icelandic Keelboat Association, and I gave a talk in Reykjavik in appreciation. We toured the Settlement Exhibition at the City Museum. The first humans in Iceland were Viking settlers who arrived around 870 A.D. In just over 100 years, these bold mariners had made their way to Greenland and Canada.  

The new crew turned up on August 7, and we were underway the next day. Fridrik, a photographer and dauntless sailor who circumnavigated Iceland solo in his 33-foot X Yacht, filmed our departure. Jim, Chris, Sean and Denise, all Quetzal veterans and good friends, had a lumpy first sail as we pushed north through a leftover swell opposed by strong winds. We decided to take the long way to Norway, along the north shore of Iceland, which would also take us just above the Arctic Circle. We skirted the dramatic headlands of the Vestfirdir (west fjords) and made landfall at Isafjordur, where several sailboats were holed up. They were waiting for the ice conditions in East Greenland to improve before carrying on. In what had become a pleasant ritual, we made our way to the pool for a soak. Every town in Iceland has a pool that usually includes a hot and (really) cold tub. You alternate from one to the other. 

We had fair winds as we headed east, rounding the headland of Horn at latitude 66 degrees, 30 minutes. I had a reminder of the many miles Quetzal has before her. In December of next year, we hope to be rounding the other horn, the infamous cape perched at the tip of South America, nearly 7,500 miles of latitude away. 

We made landfall at the small island of Grimsey. Known as the “island on the Arctic Circle,” it’s home to 30 permanent residents, thousands of puffins, and seemingly millions of pissed-off Arctic terns that dive-bombed us as we hiked to the monument that denotes the actual position of the Arctic Circle. It’s a massive round block of concrete. It’s round because the circle keeps moving a few feet each year, and it’s easier to relocate a round monument than a square one. That night, Magnus—the busiest man on the island who runs the fuel dock, airport and his own fishing boat—came aboard for a drink. He informed us that the puffins were getting ready to depart. Apparently, a memo goes out, and within a day or two, all the puffins head offshore and don’t return until the following spring. The terns were also getting ready to start their epic migration from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle and back. 

From Grimsey, we made a nonstop passage to the brooding and beautiful Faroe Islands, the next waypoint on the Viking route across the Atlantic. We were never alone; doughty fulmars and soaring gannets kept us company. We hove-to just west of the island of Kalsoy to wait for a 5-knot tidal current to change our way. It’s critical to time the tides right, and the Rak app was incredibly helpful. Riding the current, we zipped through the starkly beautiful Leirvik Fjordur channel and made landfall in the capital of Torshavn. The Faroe Islands need time to explore properly, and the few days we had were not enough. We departed for the Shetland Islands, our final stop before Norway, at 0300.

The morning was clear and the wind crisp. Chris and Jim are devoted celestial navigators, but opportunities are rare in the often cloudy north. This was the perfect morning. Chris skillfully measured the angular distance between the silvery crescent moon and Jupiter, a process called lunar distance, and a challenging sight to take. He then patiently worked Jim and me through the process, and, many calculations later, we were able to check the accuracy of our ship’s chronometer. This technique was used by Joshua Slocum and other early voyagers, which liberated them from the need for accurate timepieces. 

The North Sea was determined to keep us from calling at the Shetland Islands. A hard east wind accompanied by 8-to-10-foot seas with an annoyingly short period between persuaded us to carry on for Norway. Denise and Sean took long stints at the helm, conning Quetzal to weather. 

The last three days of the crossing proved to be the toughest as we pounded our way east. Conditions finally eased as we approached the coast. We sighted the red-and-white lighthouse on the tip of Fedje Island in the late afternoon of August 19. It was a bittersweet moment for me. Quetzal had completed her ninth Atlantic crossing, successfully retracing the Viking route, the result of two years of planning and three months of challenging sailing. It was hard to believe that we had pulled it together. But as we made our way into the quaint harbor, the only sailboat in sight, I realized that plenty of adventures lay ahead. 

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The wind’s blowing 20 across confused seas as a 5-foot swell reminds us Hurricane Chris went by not long ago. It’s a great day for my dad, my nephew and me to sail the Nova Scotia coast. We steer a broad reach at 7 knots, and that takes the sting out of the gusts as we wend through lumpy seas like a skier through moguls. It’s not all good times; the sky’s gone the color of old nickels, and our boat skids awkwardly off every 10th wave. Still, there’s plenty to like for three generations of McCarthys aiming south from Shelburne onward to round Cape Sable for a night on the Bay of Fundy shore.

A set of larger waves slides beneath Nellie, my trusty Beneteau First 42, and one dollop of wave spanks her transom and — splash! — lands in my father’s lap. It’s a pot-full of cold ocean, but on this day, it makes Ted grin. “Rub a dub dub!” he chortles. My nephew Mac responds from the wheel, “Three men in a tub!” and we smile to recognize ourselves in this building sea.

Yes, it’s the three of us aboard this tub, and from my nephew to me to my dad, it’s three perspectives on an ocean experience. You see, the old man’s been remembering the whales he saw 50 years back and the shoals of fish he sailed through when he was young. But Mac says he’s seen mostly jellyfish in his sailing, and rarely a whale. In other words, my crew combines past and future into a crucial ecological present: Ted McCarthy is into his eighth decade afloat, Mac Huffard is getting ready for college with two weeks at sea, and I’m somewhere between the kid my dad took sailing and the skipper my nephew knows.

The Gulf of Maine is changing around us in increments we register over a lifetime but overlook in any single season. Its illustrious fishing history has been on my mind this whole cruise, and sharing the cockpit with family born in 1941 and in 1999 gives me a new appreciation for the slow changes each generation lives through in any ecological community. Cape Sable is just ahead, and it occurs to me we’re rushing along atop the Gulf of Maine as an ecosystem, as a historical context and as a family setting.

The summer goal was pretty simple: first, cruise from Cape Elizabeth, Maine, to Cape Sable across the Gulf of Maine’s celebrated fishing banks; second, visit eastern Nova Scotia; third, get back around Cape Sable and return to Maine on the shorter leg across the Bay of Fundy. The first leg was about 300 miles, with the promise our keel would pass over fish-rich Browns Bank and Jeffreys Bank and other shallows that arc from Cape Cod all the way to the Grand Banks. We weren’t going all the way to Newfoundland — I only had three weeks — but I was excited this little venture would combine marine ecology and family to truly appreciate the Gulf of Maine.

The area from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia is the Gulf of Maine: 70,000 square miles of life as deep as the Empire State Building and as cold as the refrigerator in your kitchen. If someone asks where I’m from, I say “Maine,” but I’d probably do better to say “the Gulf of Maine.” That second answer would emphasize coastline and islands quilted with spruce and known to heron and osprey. The prevailing winds blow from southwest to northeast, from Cape Cod’s glossy tip to the matte-gray breakers off Cape Sable, a journey of 300 miles, if run by sailboats in the Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race. It’s no surprise these racers encounter a living ocean’s emissaries in that rich expanse of currents and banks. Out there are fin whales, right whales, humpbacks and sharks. Maybe you’ve been, and out there you saw terns, gannets, gulls and storm petrels. Of course, amid these visitors to the surface are hints of deeper play from mackerel, herring, haddock and hake.

Aboard Nellie, the crew accommodates my enthusiasm for the lives and ledges 50 fathoms beneath our deck shoes. My nephew should care that right here in his family’s front yard is one of Earth’s miracles of abundance. Sandy shallows like Browns Bank separate the warm Gulf Stream from the cold Gulf of Maine, and tidal streams mingle nutrients that power spectacular plankton blooms, feeding the herring that feed the cod that bring the tuna and swordfish and sharks and whales. But when you’re 19, ecological history seems less important than the social present. Nevertheless, on this family cruise I try to impress that we follow enterprising fishermen who knew these banks before there was a United States or a diesel engine.

A mile ahead of us, a white hull steams east below whirling radar domes and scything antennas. I say, “Imagine it’s 1575. You’re sailing here from Cornwall or Brittany with a simple compass and a couple of prayers. Those people were adventurous.” The crew nods, wary of my enthusiasm for the historical. Today’s fishermen have my respect too, and in a sense, the fishing is the story. The fishing brought Europeans in their shallops and pinnaces, and even the longboats of Leif Erikson back in the year 1000. Erikson, they say, settled Vinland (what’s now Newfoundland), and on the foggy rollers off Matinicus you can imagine the squeal of those oars.

If wanderlust brought the Norsemen, cod brought Portuguese, French and English fishermen. Those were in the Cabot, Hudson and de Champlain days; fat-bottomed fishing boats rollicked in Maine harbors before Jamestown or Plymouth Plantation even existed. On the Isles of Shoals, at Popham Beach, up on Monhegan, men who might have drunk with Shakespeare and fired on the Spanish Armada dried their fish on New World racks, pulled their nets near Wabanaki families and, each autumn, packed their holds to sail protein back to a hungry Europe.

But where are the fish these earlier generations applauded? I’m listening through the hull to hear the Gulf of Maine’s gentle testimony — there’s a cautionary tale unfolding. Sailing from Cape Elizabeth to Cape Sable buys you a front-row seat to contemplate the plenty this gulf once held, and a view of what loss looks like at the ecosystem level. The marine life I encountered today — gannets, guillemots and terns in the air, a whale at some distance, a shoal of bluefish to port shepherded by five gulls — is a fraction of the vibrant communities that once interacted here. Early visitors left clear written records of their days. In 1602, John Brereton described: “Whales and Seales in great abundance … Tunneys, Anchoves, Bonits, Salmons, Lobsters, Oisters having Pearle, and infinite other sorts of fish, which are more plentifull upon those coasts of America, than in any other part of the known world.”

“More plentifull,” indeed. A dozen generations back, our ancestors reported walruses off Nova Scotia, beluga whales all the way to Boston, great auk in the thousands, salmon runs to push a rowboat upriver, right whales aplenty and, above all, the majesty of cod.

Looking out for fishing boats, I tell Mac it was the limitless regenerative power of cod that bankrolled early America. Cod are the perfect inhabitants for these perfect waters, feeding on the sand lance and capelin and other tiny denizens of the shallow banks nearby. Around 1740, rich men in the Massachusetts State House hung a wooden codfish above their chamber to remind themselves where wealth comes from. They called it “the sacred cod”! Today, you can barely find a codfish. By some estimates the Gulf of Maine holds only one-third of 1 percent of the cod here when the Mayflower came ashore.

My dad says he remembers boats going out of Boston and cod as cheap fish for Friday nights.

Mac says, “I’ve never seen a codfish.”

I think that if each generation normalizes the conditions it inhabits it can only presume the ecology it encounters to be “natural.” We’re trapped in a limited perspective, like boats in the fog. Maybe sailing is a useful antidote because so many of us learn to sail in family groups, and sharing a cockpit with your family’s youngest and oldest is also sharing the long view on ocean health.

Four hundred years along, Gulf of Maine cod teeter on the edge of endangered status. Industrial fishing in these waters pulled so many fish so fast that even the cod could not reproduce quickly enough to sustain their dizzying numbers. Endless supply was the assumption and endless resilience was the expectation as vigorous trawling of undersea banks like Jeffreys Ledge and Cashes Ledge dug and gouged the seafloor into a mucky morass. Powerful mechanized fleets were deployed from the 1920s on. “The combined force of decades of fishing by domestic and foreign trawl fishers stripped the bottom of life, and rearranged the very foundation of the gulf,” writes marine biologist Callum Roberts. “Trawling had become a geologic force.”

When I was a kid, more powerful fishing boats from Portland to Gloucester followed the cod offshore where they mated and shoaled, and there collected the oldest, healthiest fish in that vulnerable moment. We thought it was business as usual back in the 1970s, but factory fishing swept up the last best hope, and left us with a stunted ecosystem. I recall catching codfish on a jig off the New Meadows River, in Maine, in the mid-’70s, at a time when ecologists were warning of a collapse and the fishing industry scoffed and brought more technology to bear. That last cod I caught was green black, goggle-eyed, held firmly at the jaw by my big hook. I saw only a personal success in those fins and smells, a good fish I’d caught with my hands, and not the last twitch of a receding era.

In Nova Scotia, we tied up to fishing docks and I chatted with amiable, welcoming fishermen. They’ve adjusted their practices since the 1992 moratorium on cod fishing. “I’m mostly for the haddock when I can, and the lobsters all winter,” said one skipper in West Head. Another fisherman told me of the sustainable tuna industry off Cape Sable, where men fish hook-and-line for bluefin tuna in an enterprise free of bycatch and destruction. They all work hard to satisfy the appetite for fish ashore, and deserve our consideration.

Across the border, Maine fishermen suffered a record-low cod catch in 2015 (about 250,000 pounds), and promptly had a worse year in 2016 (170,000 pounds). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tells us the spawning population in the Gulf of Maine has never been smaller — and the overall decline since 2005 has been 80 percent. That is 80 percent from already rotten, overfished, habitat-debased 2005, not my heyday, shiny-jigging 1975, much less a robust base line such as 1575. For someone born in 1999, these fisheries seem normal; to my dad, they seem sadly depleted. I deduce that our influence unfolds at such a slow pace that profound environmental changes surprise us all — like watching the clock’s hour hand, you know it’s moving but you just can’t see it.

Another steady-slow cause of environmental harm is our hotter climate. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than just about any body of water on the planet. This warming means big changes to the ecosystem. A retired fisheries officer I interviewed said ocean warming is a threat to Nova Scotia: “You can blame Exxon or you can call it God’s wrath, but the fact is cold-water fish are going elsewhere, or not surviving.”

The cod, halibut and even lobsters are sensitive to temperature, and as the Gulf of Maine warms and as it acidifies, signature species such as lobster struggle. With spray coming aboard and Nellie fighting the helm in a trough, I wonder what this watery place will look like two decades on, when Mac takes his kids to the sea.

But it’s not all bad news. On the sail up here we glided across fishing banks on a calm day, and the flat seas were delightful with life. The cod might be all but gone, yet I saw humpback whales spouting bubbles into the setting sun, white-sided dolphins leaping clear into the air and shearwaters, storm petrels and gannets dancing against blue skies. The Gulf of Maine still thrives, still lives if we will let its residents rebound. The silly “three men in a tub” rhyme ends with the ambiguous line, “and all of them out to sea,” creating uneasiness, a sense of imminent catastrophe. But what if “out to sea” is where you want to be? Then you’re not condemned, you’re lucky to know that watery place in a personal way. That seems closer to the family experience I’m having this brisk day.

To be at sea with a young sailor is to wish for an ecological future healthier than the one I’ve occupied. Maybe with awareness and planning, the story of decline in these waters can change into one of revitalization. Mac turns the wheel and looks to windward; what blows from there is the possibility of a resilient, blooming Gulf of Maine or, sadly, a wholesale unraveling of the ecology under climate warming and aggressive industrial fishing. Which way will we steer? Which way will he steer?

The Gulf of Maine is just the place for cruising sailors to take on these questions because it hosts so much incredible sailing amid so much incredible marine life. Cruisers enjoy a direct view of ocean health, and organizations like Sailors for the Sea and Turn the Tide on Plastic attest to the sailing community’s engagement. You can only hope coming generations will know the thrill of marine creatures riding their bow waves or spouting in the distance.

A flash in the water was a chunk of driftwood. Dad says, “Your grandfather saw leatherback turtles off Cape Ann,” and I think of the creatures once neighbors and now merely memories. And here we are, three generations who care about the ocean, and each of us with our own ocean in mind. Soon we’ll drop a reef in the mainsail and send Mac forward to secure the tack, to tighten the clew, to motion from the mast while my father steers us into the wind and I crank the halyard snug. A metaphor? Sure, a metaphor of people working together for the well-being of the ship, a symbol of active cooperation guaranteeing sustainability for the craft that floats them.

Jeffrey McCarthy is director of the environmental humanities graduate program at the University of Utah.

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For three days in the fall of 1834, dense fog made it impossible to shoot the sun at midday. The navigator of the ship Margaret, bound for Canada from Europe, deduced by dead reckoning that they’d passed Cape Race on Newfoundland. Three hundred nervous immigrants from Ireland were surely ready to put the infamous Cabot Strait behind them. Running fast before a strong southeasterly, Margaret was closing fast on the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

And then: disaster.

Just a day later, Margaret slammed into the cliffs of St. Paul Island, 14 miles north of Cape North on Cape Breton Island. Miraculously, all of the passengers and crew made it ashore alive. The four vessels that wrecked on St. Paul a year later weren’t as lucky. Not a single person survived.

John Cabot gave St. Paul its name in 1497; the first Europeans settled on nearby Cape Breton a couple of centuries later. By 1837, due to the increasing number of shipwrecks, lighthouses were erected on each end of St. Paul and a lifesaving station was established. On foggy days, the lighthouse keepers fired cannons to ward off approaching ships. Even so, hundreds of vessels piled into St. Paul. Today, scuba divers have collected centuries’ worth of wreckage.

On our annual trips northward to Labrador and Greenland, when running fast before a summer southwesterly on our Mason 44, Frances B, St. Paul slipped by as a ghostly shadow. Later, heading south with an autumn norther, it rimmed the horizon as a clear-cut blue shadow. Always, rough conditions ruled out any close inspection.

Finally, in 2017, the weather slumbered, the ocean flattened in a rare spell of calm and the chance to visit this elusive island presented itself. Densely forested hills, almost 500 feet high, with trees that were battered by winter storms into twisted copses of ancient gnomes, dropped down to a shore of steep cliffs. Passing headland after headland, each named after a wrecked ship, Frances B slipped into Atlantic Cove. A hulk of a house among trees on a gentle slope sagged toward earth, its broken windows looking like a skull’s hollow sockets. Another fallen heap of planks teetered on the edge of a cliff. This bay on the east shore, protected from the westerly swells, was in the 19th and early 20th century the main hub of activity, with an administration center housing lifesaving equipment and a Marconi telegraph station. A stretch of sharp, vertiginous cliffs must have presented as much a challenge to visitors then as they do now.

About a mile north, in Martin Powers Cove, Nancy circled the boat between rocky walls as I took the dinghy in to examine the shoreline. As I stepped ashore onto a blanket-size piece of sand, I realized I was probably trespassing; landing on the island requires an official permit from the Canadian coast guard. Wild, multicolored rock stacks stood sentinel around me. We couldn’t legally anchor here either. Anyhow, it was risky business, too close to the rocks, and who knew what wreckage was waiting to swallow our anchor.

Back on board, at the back of the cove we saw a saddle of lowland, an isthmus of sorts, to the west shore. We continued on, and it didn’t take us long to circumnavigate this 3-mile-long island. A lighthouse stood on its northern tip, actually a rocky islet separated from the main island by a narrow cut, called Tickle on the charts but “Tittle” by Cape Bretonians. On the western shore, not far from the end of St. Paul, we came to Trinity Cove, where a reddish-sand beach might serve to land a dinghy if not for the pronounced swell.

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Likewise, the high shore looked manageable to reach a small plateau, empty of any traces of a once busy lobster cannery. A small stream trickled down to the beach, obviously from one of the lakes midisland (their waters, according to reports, devoid of fish). No mammals occur here either. We expected to see many birds, but there were none except for one bald eagle and a few herring gulls — it’s no wonder that many shipwrecked survivors starved to death before anyone from the mainland could reach them across the rough open sea or, in cold months, through the broken, jumbled ice.

Our next visit was the Magdalen Islands, or rather, les Îles de la Madeleine (after all, this is Quebec). Before the days of radar, they must have made an even more formidable barrier in the Gulf of St. Lawrence than they do now. The group stretches right across the gulf westward for some 30 nautical miles — and more if you count the northern rocky outliers, Île Brion and Rochers aux Oiseaux, or le Corps Mort (!) off the southwest end. The entire skinny archipelago is shaped like a gigantic boomerang sandbar of red sandstone, and for centuries has been a trap to any vessel somewhat off course. Timber from wrecks survives in some of the oldest houses, and in at least one church. The dune-shaped heights on the main islands surround extremely shallow lagoons that are favorites with windsurfers skittering in high winds over tiny wavelets, some with water only inches deep. The lagoons also support mussel aquaculture.

Deep water near Île d’Entrée, off the group’s southern end, allowed close inspection of the cliffy shore that has eroded into bridges, arches and buttresses. Erosion has also silted a small manmade harbor that was off limits to Frances B‘s 7-foot draft. The northern shore, exposed to winter storms, rose in razor-sharp ridges and cathedral peaks. The swelling mounds of green midisland hills have great trails, and we waved to hikers high above.

Ashore in Cap-aux-Meules, at a restaurant called les Pas Perdus, we went through a bucket of mussels, steamed straight from the sea, the best of any we tried in the Canadian Maritimes. The Cap-aux-Meules harbor, with its high breakwaters, receives all the ferries and other shipping into the islands. The adjacent marina was chock-full of boats — a major change from a previous, memorable visit. Back in 2001, on 9/11, I was interviewing Camil, the owner and manager of the boatbuilder Entreprises Leo LeBlanc & Fils, for a magazine article, when his sister Suzanne burst in with the shattering news of the twin towers.

We thought the sandstone of the Magdalens quite red, but on our landfall off the East Point of Prince Edward Island, the low sunrise painted the cliffs almost purple. It took only a short sail to reach the port of Souris, which was humming with activity, with large ferries coming and going next to a marina filled with sailboats. In 1997, an 8-mile-long bridge was built that crossed the Northumberland Strait from New Brunswick and launched Prince Edward Island, previously known for lobsters and the best potatoes, into the mainstream of summer tourism. On the east coast, once-remote inlets such as Montague River now house busy marinas, but fortunately, Georgetown, at the river’s entrance, retains the charms of a small town with long maritime traditions. On the more populated south coast, Charlottetown, the capital of this insular province, was thick with summer visitors laying siege to the delightful restaurants in Victoria Row. Off the waterfront in Hillsborough Bay, an afternoon yacht race was in full swing.

The air warmed up and the clammy fogs of the North Atlantic disappeared as Frances B headed north through Northumberland Strait toward Île Bonaventure. A nearby rocky heap, about a mile across and 250 feet high — hard to land on and even harder to scale — sounds like an odd cruising destination, but seabirds love it. Slowly, the island gained mass in the purple dawn light, and large birds levitated silently around us like ghosts — gannets looking for shoals of fish to feed their young. The sun appeared slowly, and the birds divebombed, piercing the sea, after prey. At first, the precipitous shores looked covered with patches of snow — but closer in, we realized we were looking at row upon row of kittiwakes settled on guano-pasted rock ledges. A flat slope well above was overrun by mobs of gannets, between 60,000 and 70,000 of them. To really experience the busy scene, we opted for a ride in a tourist boat from the mainland, about a mile away.

Calm weather was welcome because the anchorage off the village of Percé is quite open to any winds from south to northeast. The clear water revealed boulders dotted among the bottom seaweed, certainly calling for a tripping line on the anchor. At the bird refuge, we leaned on a railing an arm’s length from the immaculately white, elegant gannets, their faces and brilliant eyes pure art nouveau. We watched birds grooming each other affectionately, now and then stretching skyward as if beseeching the gods for healthy offspring. The pairs took turns shading their chicks, awkward with oversize feet and beaks, shedding fluff and snoozing between bouts of feeding. In a few months, these babes, after surviving their first takeoffs from the cliffs, would show up in our home waters in Georgia. The deafening din of thousands of birds calling and the powerful smell finally forced us into retreat. Back on the mainland, from the trail up Mont Ste. Anne, we looked on the cliff-lined shores and scalloped beaches as people the size of ants hopped on the rocky low-tide causeway toward Percé Rock, with its signature arch. In 2003, this rock appeared on the cover of Cruising World, with our previous boat sailing toward it.

Canso Strait, at the eastern tip of Nova Scotia, separates Cape Breton Island from the mainland. In 1955, the construction of a causeway with a lock tamed the fierce currents in the narrows of that passage. Working the fluky offshore westerlies, Frances B made a smooth passage south to the Canso Lock. A day later, we easily negotiated St. Peters Lock, the gate to the heart of Cape Breton Island: Bras d’Or Lake, an inner sea with fabulous summer cruising.

Baddeck, a town on the lake’s northern section, has most everything a cruising sailor might need or desire. The place, with a background of hills and mountains, once charmed Alexander Graham Bell enough for him to settle there. His experiments with hydrofoils must have brought more excitement here at the dawn of the 20th century than one can ever hope to see now. In 1917, he commissioned a 55-foot yawl for his daughter and her husband, Gilbert Grosvenor, the editor of National Geographic, a publication also inspired by Bell. On that yawl, Elsie, Bell presided at a meeting that led to the founding of the influential Cruising Club of America. The inventor’s spirit lingers in the area. From our anchorage between the wharf and Kidston Island, across the outer wide channel, in a forest grove high above the sea, looms Beinn Bhreagh, the Bell family mansion.

Wherever you roam, you needn’t travel far to find scenes of incredible natural beauty in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. For example, take the miles of sandy beaches and dunes at the Prince Edward Island National Park.

Bras d’Or Lake enjoys gentle weather with good summer sailing breezes. Fog, such a pest offshore, rarely occurs here. A plethora of protected, almost landlocked anchorages takes the worry of occasional tropical-storm winds off of one’s mind. Little Harbour on the Malagawatch Peninsula is a good example. A skinny thread of deep water led us into a bay bordered by forests. A massive log cabin, somewhat Alpine in character, overlooked the shore: Cape Breton Smokehouse, a lodge with a popular restaurant. Some years ago, the owners sailed into this bay after leaving Germany for a circumnavigation and fell in love with this land of forests, mountains and villages of people who keep up with their Scotch Celtic roots. In Maskell’s Harbour, not far from Baddeck, Frances B shared the anchorage with a flock of brown ducks busily nibbling underwater grasses.

Although the tides in this inner sea measure in inches, the currents in the narrow north exit from Bras d’Or into Cabot Strait can run ferociously either way. To time our passage just right, we spent the night in Big Harbour, a tight inlet snaking into the hillsides. No other boats disturbed the pool of deeper water under its bluff of white gypsum. Suddenly, silently, a bald eagle plummeted from above, feet first, and then rose toward the treetops with a fish in his talons. Minute wavelets, the only evidence of the morning drama, spread out and rippled the mirror of calm water around the boat.

On the Cape Breton coast facing Cabot Strait, two harbors provide often welcome shelter. Though quite spacious, Ingonish feels tiny in the shadows of the mountains around it, which are part of the Cape Breton Highlands. Farther north, the working fishing harbor of Dingwall, backed by a tremendous dark wall of mountains, looks right into the strait. On a stroll in the outskirts south of the town, we bumped into a small lighthouse of riveted iron panels. It once stood on the south tip of St. Paul Island, read the plaque. Near it, in the gray shingle house of the St. Paul Island Museum, we heard from the descendants of the lighthouse keepers intimate accounts of their lives spent on that lonely outpost. Our cruise of the Gulf of St. Lawrence had begun at St. Paul Island. This, it seemed, was a fitting place to conclude it.

Tom and Nancy Zydler have been frequent contributors to Cruising World for over two decades. Last summer, they completed a clockwise circumnavigation of Newfoundland, “chasing seabirds” before heading south “to our usual haunts in Georgia.”

The post Cruising Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence appeared first on Cruising World.

Just after dawn today, I opened my eyes to something I haven’t seen first thing in the morning on Osprey in quite a while: sunlight. It buttered the woodwork overhead in our cabin, flickering and darting like a bird made of light and shadow. This vision was followed by the clear tremolo of a loon nearby. We were back in Maine.

I know most people don’t necessarily associate sailing in Maine in the summer with dappled sunlight. But that’s just because they haven’t sailed on the coast of Nova Scotia. If the fog in Maine can be likened to Carl Sandburg’s “little cat feet,” then the fog in Nova Scotia is more like a Zamboni. It waits there, a heavy presence just beyond the rink of play, engine quietly rumbling, and then it moves in and obliterates all individual evidence of any boat’s presence on the water.

To the uninitiated, as we were, this can be quite intimidating. Our family of four would sail Osprey, our 45-foot steel cutter, out of a cove or a port in the morning while enjoying decent visibility or even sunshine, and within a mile or sometimes only yards of the shoreline, the fog would swallow us whole. We’d travel within this fleecy world for hours, depending entirely on radar and a chart plotter, and a compass and our ears when we were within hearing range of a buoy or lighthouse. “How on earth,” I mused to my husband, Johnny, “did men sail on ships in this stuff for ages without electronics and GPS?”

“They wrecked,” he said succinctly. “A lot.”

Sailing in Nova Scotia’s fog, I sometimes felt like the character William Hurt plays in that movie Altered States, when he uses a sensory-deprivation chamber like a fistful of psychedelic mushrooms to enter the weirder corners of his psyche. We’d go for hours, seeing nothing but variations of gray and the magenta blotches on the chart plotter, assurance from the radar that there was, indeed, another boat or a headland or a buoy or a something just a quarter of a mile away. Then, when we’d make our approaches inland, we’d emerge from the edge of that world like a diver parting the seam between air and water. Instantly, what wasn’t there now was. So startling was this transition that you began to feel as though “out there” was a different planet entirely and that you’d spent the better part of the day in some sort of parallel universe. Out there, we’d wear hats, jackets, jeans, and sea boots, and the sense of the looming North Atlantic all around us defied season and time. As soon as we’d parted the wall and re-entered summer, we’d shed our clothes all over the cockpit and squint into the sun like moles emerging from some tunneled burrow, relieved to know that the world we’d left still existed.

All of this may sound pretty unappealing, but here’s the thing: I grew to like it. Like the vagaries of light, the fog changed all the time. We had sunny fog and cloudy fog. We had lightning fog and moonlight fog. One day we had fog, rain, and sun all at the same time. We had windy fog and greasy-calm fog. We saw fog so thick it poured through the cockpit in visible misty rivers and fog so delicate it filigreed spider webs and butterflies’ wings. The fog made the ordinary quite extraordinary in a way the sun never could. It lent mystery to what otherwise would be obvious. In some of the more remote island anchorages we visited, it seemed to be the keeper of secrets and stories, weaving among the fir trees and shrouding the bright-green, blueberry-studded hillsides. The fog made Nova Scotia feel more remote and otherworldly than any other place we’ve been.

I can’t say I’d want to sail within it forever. But like the night, it made a gift of a sunlit morning, and this is no small offering.

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Much farther and there will be no turning back. We’ll be committed to a narrow slot that is literally between a rock and a hard place. I’m feeling anxious, picking up on the wariness of both Karl and Mary Beth, whose boat this is. Michael, my husband, scouts ahead with binoculars and sees the house we’re to aim toward, but it’s not blue as stated in the guide. Standing on the rail, I can make out a stake hidden by the yellow seaweed. Maybe the one we’re to leave to starboard? Mary Beth suddenly turns Hattie Lee around and heads back out.

Just two days ago we joined Karl and Mary Beth for a week in Nova Scotia cruising aboard their 36-foot Cape George cutter, Hattie Lee. We met in Lunenburg, where the architecture and civic design are so classic of a planned British colonial settlement that it is designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.

We had an uneventful 8-mile passage to Cross Island, where we now spin, debating whether to proceed or chicken out. We move in circles while Karl reviews the cruising guide directions, bearings and landmarks. The whole island is a mere speck in the ocean, about one square mile of wooded rock, with a lighthouse at the east end and a few occasionally occupied fishing shacks at the other. We’d been both lured to and warned away from the island by Peter Loveridge’s Cruising Guide to Nova Scotia. “The entrance is difficult for strangers and extreme care is required,” he warns. But only by succeeding will we have “truly cruised the coast of Nova Scotia.” How could we not try?

Karl nods at Mary Beth, who turns the boat toward the narrow entrance again. Each of us takes a watch, looking under and ahead and to the side. Though moving in slow motion, the boat seems to be going too fast. I realize it is because of the irreversible trajectory — like jumping off the high dive or shoving off from the dock, that sense of commitment to letting go.

As we head into the granite chasm of a harbor, I realize the shoals we passed earlier, the Western Hounds and Hounds Ledges that lay near the island like welcome mats, top-heavy with grey seals, looked deceptively rounded and soft. Nothing is really rounded or soft here. We can only hope that the house we are steering for, gray not blue, is the house we’re supposed to be aimed at. We’ve got a wooden stake to starboard and a house at 270 degrees, so we proceed, on faith, at a snail’s pace into the gut. Each of us is staring over the side and ahead, looking for danger for what feels a long time. When it appears that we are in the right channel, I take a breath. A mooring ball appears straight ahead, but Mary Beth passes it by, continuing to one farther inside. Very quickly we secure to the mooring, looking under the hull at the rock ledges below our 6-foot keel. Except for one suspicious outlier rock, we agree it looks safe.

It’s beautiful. Quiet. Solitary. Our space is filled with spruce trees, granite, grasses, sea, seals and terns. A whisper quiet is punctuated by the occasional swoosh of a roller sliding across the ledges. It’s like this all afternoon as we explore the exposed rock on foot, slithering over the slimy seaweed exposed by the ebb tide. Seals loll about like fat sausages with whiskers. Gannets torpedo down for small fish. Willets, piping plovers, least sandpipers, common terns, a bald eagle and a kingfisher all hunt around us. For nature lovers, this is a feast.

Continuing along the shore, past haphazardly arranged shacks, I realize that these belong to the current generation of fishermen, whose homes are on the mainland. A hundred years ago, their ancestors fished the island full time. Today, there aren’t enough fish left to recreate such a life. With that thought, a mosquito takes a sip of my blood, and I head back to Hattie Lee. As night falls, we sit on deck with our wine, with nary an annoying buzz.

Now that we are at the site of a historically significant fishing village, we get to talking about our visit to the ­Fisheries Museum in Lunenburg. That’s where I first understood the importance of fishing in Nova Scotia. Boarding a recently retired dragger-fishing vessel, I struck up a conversation with a gentleman who had been captain of the boat for some 30 years. This fact I discovered too late to prevent me from indignantly proclaiming the terrific damage to the sea floor and peripheral creatures wreaked by this style of boat. Tourists, his look said, his eyes expressing both forbearance and a bit of twinkle. I feel the tourist he sees in me.

In the early morning that outlier rock clonks on the hull, letting us know we should move because it won’t. Shortening our mooring chain as well as tying off to a second mooring solves the rocky conflict. The day’s dead calm is forecast to continue, so we feel comfortable heading out in the dinghy for another island exploration.

It’s no easy task dodging the sharp rock ledges in our rubber dink to reach the gravel landing. The tide will be out when we return, so we’ll have a long haul back to the water later. We mull this over as we lift the dinghy above the tide line. The Spanish have an expression for our efforts — vale la pena, or “it’s worth the trouble.” I’m grateful that we all consider exploration — seeking to map new territory in our lives — to be a vital aspect of why we cruise.

An old chart shows a path leading from the bay to the lighthouse at the other end of the island. From the early 1800s to as recently as 1990, this was the route for the keeper of the lighthouse and his family. In fact, the author of our cruising guide, Peter Loveridge, once had the privilege of visiting with the keeper “and his one-eyed dog and three-legged cat.” After some scrambling around, Karl finds the path, which our guidebook suggests is behind the beach “somewhere.” We can’t be sure that this is the right beach or that the path still exists, but it is encouraging to know that now we might be able to reach the lighthouse at the east end of Cross Island. A long walk will help give a perspective of depth beyond the two-dimensional edge of the island we view from the sea.

Our path parallels the beach through fields of aster, downy thistle, grasses and flitting butterflies. Farther inland, stumpy pines huddle around a small freshwater pond. Hiking alone with no signs of civilization enhances our feeling of pioneering discovery. From the pond the path returns to the shore, now along the edge of a cliff. Looking down I can see deep cuts into the rock, striated with the colors of a journey much wilder than our own. Initially deposited off Africa, these rocks were later thrust up against North America by continental drift millions of years ago. Magma flooded the cracks and fissures in a southwest-northeast orientation that made the rocks look like slices of bread. Glaciers came later to knock off the crust, and what was left is what I see here. Clearly I have been looking at the same ancient folds under Hattie Lee, under the dinghy and underfoot.

As we continue on our way, we pass a small inlet called Oil Cut, where I imagine oil was brought ashore to power the original lighthouse beacon 150 years ago. The lighthouse has been rebuilt twice, and is now automated with the help of solar power.The lighthouse keepers’ houses we find are in ruins, gutted of all reusable materials. Walking inside and looking through the empty windows on this clear, sunny day, I imagine myself living on this lofty hill overlooking the Atlantic. I call this feeling the “romance of imagination” — or illusion. You rarely consider the months of isolation, the bad weather or restricted mobility. It’s not so different from the romance of any unknown, sailing included. You have to love the whole package, which, when you think about it, is not so different from life itself.

Letting go of that dream, I walk out to join the gang by the cliffs. We picnic, just the four of us, watching a fishing boat bob in the heavy rollers 60 feet below. The fisheries have taken a beating in Nova Scotia, just like everywhere else. Despite their high original numbers back when the Vikings were hauling in cod, fish are no match for humans and fossil-fueled machines. In the late 1970s, Canada extended its territorial fishing waters to 200 miles to save the industry. Even that was not enough. If they wanted anything at all, fishermen themselves realized, they needed to limit the harvest. Since the lobster season is staggered and generally does not include the cruising season of July to late September, we mariners are relieved of dodging entangling pot lines. I find the fishermen’s discipline in the face of the fisheries’ imminent collapse reassuring, although I’m fairly sure self-regulation is the ideal, not the given.

An hour later we are hauling our dinghy 100 feet to the water. Although the outboard won’t start, our apprehension about a rough return trip proves unfounded. Anxiety must be the dark form of illusion. It’s enough to keep you from doing something you can do, as much as the romantic encourages you to go right ahead with something you may not be prepared to do.

Our last night on Cross Island, mosquitoes swarm with a vengeance — a reminder that one night does not a reality prove. I grab my drink and, with a farewell to the setting half-moon, follow the others below.

The calm weather holds through the next morning, giving us fair visibility and calm seas to get ourselves out of this geologic wrinkle. Steering northerly, we pass forlorn Little Duck Island, a silhouette of skeletal trees bleached with cormorant droppings. We leave the maze of islets called the Rackets to port, and make our way closer to the mouth of Mahone Bay. We anchor in a snug pond formed by three islands — Gifford, Rous and Ernst — and once again, all is silent. The boat shed on Gifford is quiet, and the one other boat in the pond appears to be unoccupied. The only beach we are confident to land at is on Sheep Island, which we passed on our way into the anchorage. Because the currents are running through the channels between the islands, and the distance to Sheep is farther than any of us wants to row, Karl is trying again to get the outboard running. Michael told him yesterday that the only spark plug aboard gave no spark, but Karl bends to the task with diligence, and soon the motor coughs to life. I feel like we should all recite Kipling: “If … you can trust yourself when all men doubt you.” His perseverance is all I can think about for the rest of the day.

Sheep Island is a mere 500 yards long, with an abbreviated sandy hook that completes the island’s shape of a stingray. We pull the dinghy up on the sand, where Michael and I strip for a swim. The water is barely 60 degrees, but it feels comfortable enough. Swimming along the shore, I can see a large boulder that appears to contain hundreds of sea creature fossils. We’re swimming around an island that was once far under the sea, sailing slowly away from Africa. What a tiny bit of earth we experience in our brief lives.

The air temperature hovers at an above-average high in the mid-70s. Shirtsleeves in the day, long sleeves at night and no sign of fog make cruising a joy. We are just plain lucky.

We take a short dinghy ride from the anchorage to a dock on the mainland, where Michael and I opt for the 4-mile hike to the town of Mahone Bay. Because the roads are quiet, it’s a pleasant walk, past houses perched on hills adorned with cultivated lawns on the one side and small seaside cottages on the other. Though nobody waves or stops to offer us a ride, the locals’ good-natured ­personality appears in the whimsical wooden creatures peeking out of tree trunks.

In Mahone Bay we meet up with Karl and Mary Beth, who have sailed Hattie Lee to a mooring just offshore. Much like tourist towns in Vermont or Cape Cod, Mahone Bay sports funky shops and restaurants. As we sit overlooking the harbor for a very tasty seafood lunch, what impresses me most is the youth and quiet of the clientele. The whole day has been singularly noise-free: no mowers, blowers, music or loud voices around us. The ­tranquil mood stays with us as we sail around Mahone Bay, enjoying the easterly wind and protected seas blessedly devoid of lobster traps (unlike Maine), then head back to our pondlike anchorage for the night.

With so many islands inside Mahone Bay, we have a choice of protected anchorages with views of forest, beach and expanses of island-dotted ocean. Sunday morning we head for Mason Island with its curved sand beach, about 3 miles to the east. We set sail and are soon joined by cruising and racing sailboats pouring out of Chester Harbour.

When we arrive at Mason, Sunday cruisers have claimed much of the anchorage along the beach. It’s not so much the company of other boats, but the wind, persisting from the east, that makes us consider moving on. In the current wind direction, this is no real harbor at all. There’s no dismissing the lure of the crowd, the X on the chart that clearly states one should anchor here. But after swinging wildly on our hook, we move around to the west side of the island. Though we are the only boat choosing to anchor off this shore, we feel secure in the perfect calm. With all the other boaters on the other side in the conventional anchorage, we have this narrow beach to ourselves. No people, no bathing suits. While Karl and Mary Beth explore the red sand beach, Michael and I enjoy a nice long swim in water almost as clear as the Caribbean.

Though the anchorage is good for the day, none of us wants to dare the night. We’ve had too many emergency moves in the dark to take a chance on wind shifts, so in the late afternoon we up anchor and drift across the mile to Rafuse Island. Here we tuck into a semicircular cove for the night. There’s no competition for anchoring space, but we have trouble finding water shallow enough for dropping the hook without putting ourselves on the beach. Years of gravel mining have turned this basin into a deep quarry with steep sides. Finally, circling around in front of the sandbar connecting Great and Little Rafuse, we find an area that’s about 30 feet deep and anchor. Though the sandy beach looks inviting, the cruising guide informs us that the owner has gone to great lengths to keep people off, despite 150 years of public use. There is a strong suggestion to challenge this stance, but the owner’s beautiful Herreshoff sailing dinghy puts us in a more sympathetic mood, and we remain in the cockpit for sunset.

By all rights we should have endured at least a few fog-shrouded mornings. Apparently the cold Labrador Current and warm Gulf Stream have called a truce, as we’ve been blessed with clear blue skies and warm days the entire week. Our best sail of the trip comes on our last day. A light wind swings to the southwest and we set all four sails, leaving Mahone Bay astern. Breezing past the familiar Rackets and Little Duck, we haul northwest around Fairhaven Peninsula. From this distance, Lunenburg appears and rises uphill from the harbor. Roofs in shades of red and orange and yellow stack up one above the other like a Cubist painting, protectively overlooking the curved shorefront of yachts and fishing vessels. T.S. Eliot wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” No longer a stranger to the town or the bays, I feel I am coming back into my home port.

Since shipwrecking in the Bahamas 40 years ago, Ida Little and Michael Walsh continue cruising shoal-draft craft from Nova Scotia to the Bahamas. They are co-authors of Beachcruising and Coastal Camping, available from Amazon.

The post Nova Scotia: Nature Lovers’ Delight appeared first on Cruising World.

To reach this Canadian Maritimes cruising ground, most East Coast sailors would cross to Nova Scotia on their own boats and enter the lake through the lock in St. Peters. Once inside, there’s 1,200 miles of coastline to explore before returning home or leaving through the Great Bras d’Or Channel and passing under Seal Island Bridge to continue on to Newfoundland or points farther east or north.

My wife, Sue, and I arrived instead by car (Read “Plan C“). We took the ferry from Portland, Maine, to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and from there, drove east to Cape Breton Island. Our destination: Baddeck, home to charter company start-up Sailing CBI, and its owners, Paul and Donna Jamieson. They’d be our hosts for the week, along with Jamie Schumacker, captain of the company’s new Alpha 42 catamaran, Cape Bretoner 1. Also joining us for the adventure was sailing photographer Bob Grieser, and along the way, we’d welcome aboard a good number of visitors who were either friends of the Jamiesons (seemingly everyone on Cape Breton) or just curious about the boat. You don’t see a lot of ocean-going catamarans in this neck of the woods.

Our week got off to an interesting start. After spending our first night in a lovely little cove up the Washabuck River, we awoke the next morning and motored across St. Patrick’s Channel to a mooring in front of the Jamieson’s house, where we planned to pick up guests for the day. Circling while our captain rowed ashore to fetch them, we discovered that one of the props had gone missing. The good news: we could still motor, and sail, of course; the bad: maneuvering in close quarters was interesting.

Tied at the mooring, calls were made to secure a replacement. Meantime, we took full advantage of the sunshine and our surroundings to enjoy lunch and an afternoon of swimming and kicking back. Later, we headed south, past the working gypsum quarry and loading docks that bring large ore carries into that part of the lake, to a lovely shoreside anchorage where we spent the night.

The next day, we completed our tour of what the locals call the small lake and returned through Little Narrows, bound for the Jamieson’s mooring once again to pick up a new crew of people and a chef, who’d do the heavy lifting during our evening dinner cruise through lovely Baddeck harbor. Golden evening sunlight flooded the cockpit as about a dozen of us sat around the table and enjoyed the ride. Cape Bretoner ghosted along under genoa as the collective “we” took it all in. Then as we turned to head back up the lake, if the evening wasn’t fine enough, a nearly full moon popped up to light our way back.

The next two days, we struck off south, passing through the drawbridge at Iona and into the big lake. I’d wager you could spend a summer here, exploring the endless nooks and crannies accessible to a cruising sailboat. Locals would argue it would take a lifetime. Among the landfalls we ticked off: Maskells Harbor, The Boom and Frazer Cove, Little Harbor, Marble Mountain — only a handful, but as many as our time would allow.

Sunday morning, we pointed the bows back to Baddeck, where we arrived in time for the Bras d’Or Lake Yacht Club‘s annual Sail Past, the kick off to Race Week, held the first week of every August. In a lively 20-knot breeze, 100 or so boats of all description — from schooner to jet-ski — paraded past the club. The shores on either side of the harbor were lined with people enjoying the sights and a perfect sunny afternoon. The party that followed was monumental, and, according to reports, ran well into the night. Knowing we had work to do the next day, we prudently retreated to comfy accommodations at the nearby Lynnwood Inn.

You wouldn’t know the revelry went well into the wee hours. On Monday, it was all business as sailboats line up near the starting line, set just off the Alexander Graham Bell estate at Beinn Bhreagh. A near perfect 10 to 12 knot breeze sent us on our way. Now, we were aboard Paul Jamieson’s family boat, a C&C 33, which he’s raced for years on the lake. By the third and final lap of the buoys the breeze had grown quite sporty. Spray flew off the bow as we flew toward the finish — a perfect end to our first — and not last — visit to Canada’s inland sea.

Alpha 42

Bras d’Or Lake

Bras d’Or Lake

Bras d’Or Lake

Bras d’Or Lake

Bras d’Or Lake

The post Memorable Cruising in Bras d’Or Lake appeared first on Cruising World.

The plan was for my wife, Sue, and me to drive to Portland, Maine, the last week of July, and from there, take the overnight ferry to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. That all went swimmingly. We boarded our ship on Saturday evening, had a sound night’s sleep and awoke to pea soup fog on Sunday. Perfect, eh?

Eight hours and 300 miles later, we pulled into the parking lot of the Lynnwood Inn in Baddeck, a lovely little town at the heart of Bras d’Or Lake. The first order of business: We met our hosts, Paul and his wife, Donna, and rendezvoused with marine photographer Bob Grieser.

The second order of business was to have dinner. Over a feast (best fish cakes and homemade beans I can recall, in case you were asking), we quickly realized that Plan A — to set sail across the lake the next morning, cove hop for the week and then return to tour the famed Cabot Trail the following Saturday — would need to be revised. Our boat, it seems, a new Alpha 42 catamaran, had been walloped by headwinds on its delivery north from New York and was still at sea.

So on to Plan B. The next morning we hopped into Paul’s truck and struck off for the Glenora distillery for breakfast at the only single malt maker outside of Scotland. After a tour, we headed for the Cabot Trail and Cape Breton’s highlands. As we climbed the twisting roadway, cliffs plunged to the ocean below and cloud-covered mountains hovered overhead. Spectacular and breathtaking are two words that come quickly to mind. Monday night, we stayed at the Keltic Lodge, a 1940s gem of a hotel, perched overlooking the ocean at Middle Head in Ingonish Center. Just offshore, Ingonish Island lay shrouded in mist. This expansive bay is one to visit again, I noted.

Our travels Tuesday took us on a tour of Highland Links, one of several golf courses that make Cape Breton a destination of choice for discerning ball whackers. From there, we drove to the ferry that runs across the 100-yard wide entrance to St. Ann’s Bay and then back to Baddeck, where the boat, Cape Bretoner 1, sat waiting at the dock.

An hour later, we were sailing. In a fresh breeze we reached off across St. Andrew’s Channel, tacked, and then sailed closed hauled to the Washabuck River and a tight little anchorage in Deep Cove. With the hook down and not a ripple on the water, we spent the evening munching on mussels and Donna’s fish chowder and strawberry shortcake. What a way to end our first day on the water.

Overnight rain gave way to gray, but warm skies this morning. A swim got Paul and I moving early, and eventually we made enough noise to wake our mates. Breakfast was Donna’s bacon and Swiss cheese quiche, and then we were off, bound across St. Patrick’s Channel to pick up more crew for a daysail through the narrows to the south. And then we weren’t. Trying to maneuver to pick up our guests, Cape Bretoner was suddenly quite awkward to steer, which happens when two engines and two saildrives have only one prop between them.

So now we’re moored. The sun’s shining, the lake’s lovely and we’re cooking up Plan C. Stay tuned.

Stay tuned for more updates from Nova Scotia as Mark explores the inland sea.

The post Let’s Try Plan C appeared first on Cruising World.

Zartman- canal

We had arrived in Canso with a slight feeling of urgency. Originally we had hoped to be sailing across the Laurentian Trough toward St. Pierre and Miquelon, just off the south coast of Newfoundland, on the longest day of the year; instead, several days after the solstice we were still on the wrong side of Cape Breton Island, and there was squirrely weather on the way. From Ganymede’s deck we could see, over the low seawall, the distant perpetual fog bank that shrouded the way to the Grand Banks. We briefly considered jumping offshore and doing a 320-mile hop to Trepassey Bay, just west of Cape Race on the south shore of Newfoundland, but scuppered that idea after a look at the forecast. Three successive lows, full of rain and wind from all quarters—not strong wind, but shifting enough to make for terribly confused seas. Plan B, to overnight to Louisburg, then proceed to Scatarie Island, Port Morien and thus to Sydney, was scrapped for the same reason: none of the anchorages available is suitable for all winds.

We had not even entertained the idea of transiting the Bras D’or Lakes until it became the only good option—that or stay in Canso, which would not be too sheltered when the wind shifted to north. Once inside the lakes, though, the wind could do what it wanted and we’d be as snug as could be wished.

It was as calm as a millpond as we motored across Chedabucto Bay—what people call a weathermaker in these parts, and though it began to rain as we entered St. Peter’s Canal—a narrow defile blasted through a solid granite ithsmus—the wind held off until the next day. Once through the single lock that gives access to the lakes and past the quaint old swing bridge, we anchored in a good sheltered cove just to port and settled in to wait it out.

We were ineffably glad we did, in the end—not only was the town of St. Peter’s a pleasant place to spend a couple of days, but the weather that came through would have been horrible in any of the other places we might have gone—or in Canso, if we’d stayed put. Happy in our haven, though, I grilled on our charcoal BBQ for the fifth day in a row and rejoiced that we were not tossing about on the Grand Banks among all the fishing boats and fog and oil rigs. We made good time up the lakes, since however hard the wind blew it couldn’t get up any significant seas, and we had a delightful sail across the Great Bras D’or Lake, made more delightful since I managed to get the self-steering vane to work, after a fashion. Though it steered like a pregnant manatee, yawing through a shocking 20 degrees, it did maintain a general course, and we have hopes that with some fiddling it might do better. If only we knew what bit of it to fiddle with.

The town of Baddeck was a disappointment—not only was the only decent anchoring spot chock full of empty mooring balls, a huge placard on shore forbade any anchoring among them. A stupid waste of space, and something we’d hoped to have left behind in the US. Instead we trudged through pelting rain torrents to an admittedly more sheltered spot inside Baddeck Bay, and spent two days looking out the portholes at the driving rain and being very glad to not be out at sea in that kind of frightful wind. It was too far to try and row to town, or land and try to walk, so we never saw it up close.

It wasn’t until Monday that things settled down enough to let us leave, but as the day progressed the clouds finally cleared, and by late morning, as the tide and funneled wind were shooting Ganymede at record speed out the narrow mouth of the great Bras D’or, we saw the long-forgotten sun.

Of course the wind that sped us along so well at first became a tribulation when we had to turn to enter Sydney, and even after we were in the harbor proper it took over an hour to get all the way down to a quiet anchoring spot just at the mouth of the Sydney River. Our collection of photocopied charts did not include a close-up of Sydney harbor, so I had to navigate in using OpenCPN, a program that displays photocopies of charts, running it off of a USB stick on our old laptop, which has more battery life than our new one. It’s an ungainly way to navigate, since you must zoom in so far to see the soundings that you can’t see surrounding features, and scrolling through miles of screen to get to a bit you want to see without losing the scale you want takes ages. Give me a 3’X2’ paper chart any day, that can be plotted on with a pencil, and can be taken all in at a single glance, and takes only temporary harm from a spilled glass of water. But the backup is nice to have for emergencies.

Though it looks a squalid, insalubrious place at first inspection, Sydney has proved a gold mine for things that cruisers need. Tying the dinghy up to a pontoon belonging to the Sydney Dragon Boat club (Dragon boats! Sounds exotic, but they’re really just forty-foot canoes painted with scales, paddled by twenty people to the beat of a drum up in the bows), we jumped the railroad tracks to find a laundry, more fast food places than even Halifax (you can stand at one Tim Horton’s—a sort of Dunkin Donuts—and see two others along the same road), and three grocery stores barely a biscuit-toss apart. So now we’re washed, and fed, and stocked up, and when the weather permits we’ll be off for Newfoundland. Running a little behind, perhaps, but summer seems to be as well, and sailing through the Bras D’or was well worth the extra time.

We are the Zartman family: Ben & Danielle, and our three girls, Antigone, Emily and Damaris. We created this blog to chronicle our sailing adventures on Ganymede, a home-finished 31-foot gaff-rigged cutter, which has been our home since 2009, when we sailed from San Francisco, California, to the Sea of Cortez, then down along the Central American coast. Currently in Newport, Rhode Island, we plan to sail to Canada, the U.K., and beyond this summer.

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Zartman- dinghy in Nova Scotia

These are now the longest days of the year, and up here at 45 degrees north latitude, halfway from equator to pole, there’s daylight in plenty. A good thing, too, since we were trying to make good time east along the coast. We could get up with the sun, get underway after breakfast, and after making thirty or forty miles along the coast, still be anchored in time to give the children a good run on shore, have a leisurely supper, and go to bed with the sun still glinting through the portholes. I had thought it would be difficult to get to sleep while sunbeams danced on the deckhead, but it’s actually no trouble whatsoever—just like lying down for an afternoon siesta, which is one of my greatest and rarest delights.

Another delight was the clearness of the sky—the fog took a long break, and hasn’t come back as I write this a week after our exciting entrance into Passage Island. The clearness was crucial to our plans, since we wanted to wind through the more sheltered waters inshore of all the off lying islands, and good visibility is essential. Lots of the shoals are marked only by the seas that break on them, and the antiquity of our charts means that not all charted buoys exist any more, some existing ones have been moved, and there’s a new buoy here and there also.

Pumpkin Island did not resemble a pumpkin, though it looked strangely similar to Pumpkin Hill on Utila Island in Honduras, several thousand miles away. Maybe the early explorers had only seen pumpkins that had been allowed to rot on the vine and get stove in a little aloft. Or maybe, being sailors, they knew as little about gardening as I do, and couldn’t tell a pumpkin from a rutabaga. Either way, it gave us food for thought as Ganymede wound her way between groups of foaming breakers and low-lying islands, past Necum Teuch and Ecum Secum harbors (the girls were horribly disappointed that we didn’t go in there), and six gybes later into Hawbolt Cove in Marie Joseph Harbor.

Here we encountered again one of the disadvantages of cruising in first-world countries. Even though there’s a town, since every soul owns a car there’s no need for supermarket, convenience store or roadside food stand nearby. That same town in Mexico or Central America would have had some sort of general store, a restaurant or two, and maybe (oh, fond memories!) a taco or pupusa or arepa stand next to a bus stop. Our next port of call, Isaac’s Harbor, was as bereft of services—just rows of houses among hopelessly overgrown lawns, and hardly a soul to be seen.

It was not until we arrived at the eastern end of Nova Scotia—Canso Harbor—on Saturday, that we found our first grocery store since leaving Halifax. Coming through the narrow, winding Andrews Passage under sail alone had been pretty exciting, as had been tacking into the broad, deep harbor to an anchor spot, but most exciting was finding the Co-op supermarket stocked with all sorts of fresh meat and veggies on sale. Almost as good was the “Marina”, which while it had neither depth or turning room for sailboats, had showers and laundry. A third joy was the brand-new library, with very good wifi, children’s play area, and couches ranged around a cozy ceramic-log fireplace. So what if it had hardly any books? It had Legos, which were far better—and noisier—than the reading material they did have.

Though it’s very deep and feels open, with the wind accelerating as it shoots over the low surrounding hills, Canso is still a pretty good harbor. Our initial thought had been to try and move to the Tickle—a narrow inlet at the far end of the bay—but an inspection from land banished that thought. It would be, as Danielle pointed out, “Ticklish” getting in there. As long as the wind stayed in the Southern quadrant there was nothing more that could be desired for our anchoring spot, and after a very windy first night set the anchor good and hard, we had no fears for it coming loose.

We are the Zartman family: Ben & Danielle, and our three girls, Antigone, Emily and Damaris. We created this blog to chronicle our sailing adventures on Ganymede, a home-finished 31-foot gaff-rigged cutter, which has been our home since 2009, when we sailed from San Francisco, California, to the Sea of Cortez, then down along the Central American coast. Currently in Newport, Rhode Island, we plan to sail to Canada, the U.K., and beyond this summer.

The post Tickled in Canso Bay, NS appeared first on Cruising World.

Zartman- Lunenburg, NS

Lunenburg proved everything we could wish in the way of amenities. Two grocery stores, a big hardware store, Laundromat, library, free public WiFi, and plenty of dinghy dockage. While I went off one day in search of propane, Danielle filled water jugs at the dinghy dock and the girls played among the launching rails and cradles of the shipyard. Not one but four people stopped to ask whether we needed anything or a ride anywhere or whether we’d like to come over for a gam. One of these, a Finnish artist named Ben, invited us to his house for showers and laundry, and took me to Bridgewater, way up the La Have river, in his car to top up our empty propane bottle.

Since it was rainy when we went for our big day ashore, we took Ganymede in to a public day dock to avoid getting soaked rowing the dinghy in. Returning hours later, we found that the wind had shifted and was blowing a rollicking fetch straight into Ganymede’s transom. It was impossible to back out against that, so we waited until further in the evening to escape to the quiet of the anchorage.

It was calm on Monday, and we spent the morning shopping and filling a few last water bottles, then I left Danielle and the girls at the library while I fooled with the self-steering vane mount. Our exploratory attempt to use it, and some subsequent research on the web had revealed that though it can be mounted off-center, it has to be in line with the axis of the boat. For the thousandth time I cursed the convention that makes builders round the transom of boats instead of making them square and plumb, the way nature intended, as I shimmed and jury-rigged to make the mount line up the way it needs. Once that was done and the girls back aboard we hove up the anchor and made for Mahone Bay.

Even though it was late in the afternoon we needed to get along, so that on Tuesday we could make it to a safe haven before a nasty-looking rain system arrived. It proved a delightful day for a sail, the wind force 3 on the stern, and we gybed leisurely around one island and another as we made for New Harbor, one of the tiniest holes we’ve even anchored in, but secure and quainter than a postcard.

It’s always a treat to sail onto the anchor, and once you make it gracefully in you usually wish more people had been watching. The whole place was deserted, though I have no doubt more people watched us motor out in the calm next morning than watched us sail in the night before. We left at earliest dawn, since the bad weather was supposed to arrive at 9:00 AM, and were snugly anchored in Prospect harbor at just that time.

The system was a little late, which gave us time to explore Pig Island by dinghy. There wasn’t much ashore but moss and rocks and rotting trees—not a single pig, to Damaris’ endless disappointment. She had meant to catch one and tame it.

Searching for the pigs on Pig Island

When a fine drizzle began in the afternoon we built a fire in the wood stove (in June!), opened portholes to get fresh air, and scrubbed the sole and bilges thoroughly. If we neglect to do this once every week or two, the boat begins to smell musty. The heat from the fire dried everything out nicely, and we went to bed feeling fresh and dry and warm, in spite of the wind that had begun to howl outside and the rain, which came pelting down in torrents. When we leave here we’ll try to get across the Halifax shipping lanes to Jeddore Harbor, the next quiet stop on our journey North and East.

We are the Zartman family: Ben & Danielle, and our three girls, Antigone, Emily and Damaris. We created this blog to chronicle our sailing adventures on Ganymede, a home-finished 31-foot gaff-rigged cutter, which has been our home since 2009, when we sailed from San Francisco, California, to the Sea of Cortez, then down along the Central American coast. Currently in Newport, Rhode Island, we plan to sail to Canada, the U.K., and beyond this summer.

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