Our Atlantic Trip.

Our guide for 12 hours! I guess he wanted to sail back to the States! he flew in and landed on our bimini without us noticing. When I kicked him off of that, he found the bow seat for the night. The next night, another came and tried repeatedly to land on our solar panels. I guess when you are that far out, they can't fly all the way to land, and don't want to sleep in the water. Not sure if a cormorant is good or bad luck, but we had our best sailing day after he slept there.

One of two 165' yachts that came into Halifax to ride out Irene. This is the one they kicked us off of the town dock for.

Just to recap our trip, we had a 5 day weather window provided by Commanders’ Weather Service. They were pretty accurate, but everything they were right on, we also found through our own research. They did not pick up the fact that we were going to have a nasty SE swell for all 4 days. They have responded to that that it may be Katia causing it. Even here in Salem, they were all bitching about the swell. What they gave us was piece of mind that we were not going to get slammed with a storm or real high winds. We were more comfortable each sunset knowing this.

Our first day out brought winds on the nose for the first 12 hours (predicted). We sailed 48 miles and only made 23 miles of progress. This did not look good, but at 1:00 AM, the wind switched to the NE (as predicted) and we started sailing in a straight line. This wind stayed with us for 36 hours. It was our first downwind sail in a long time. It gave us 95 miles for the first day and 120 miles for day 2. On our third day, Friday, the NE wind quit early at 3pm. This left us windless, until midnight, with a big swell. Lots of rocking and rolling.

At midnight, Saturday, the SW wind came in strong with 10-15 knots and we had to sail the rest of our trip upwind. It ended up being very lumpy with the SE swell combining with the SW wind driven waves. At one point, the wind had increased to 20-25 knots for about 6 hours.

Not sure if we discussed this before or not. Even though, the Nonsuch has balsa coring below the water line, we still sweat. During the past 4 days, the water went from 65F to 47F and back to 67F here. During the sunny days, the water is condensing on the inside of the hull. Being salt air, it is condensing salt water.

This is a beautiful town and very unique with its witch theme. We will enjoy it here. We spent this afternoon walking the town and had a great dinner at the Witches Brew.