Back at the Beach
Funny how even in colder places sailboats seem to bring you to beaches. Carter's Beach is a little cove of actually about 3 beaches sort of at the end of some sparce neighborhood. The anchorage is good as it's behind a smaller island from one side and there's, well, a beach on the other so you're pretty protected. It is a bit deep though we weren't too far off the beach and still in 10 meters of water.
Heather was on it trying to make a rain/wind cockpit enclosure after seeing O'dara's and hearing about how useful it was. We were tying up a blanket with a batton from the dodger down to the binnacle to get a feel for what we could make when SeaFinn came over and asked if we wanted to join for a beach walk.
Of course, as soon as we got to shore, the brisk sunny morning turned to straight fog, but that was almost more fitting, plus everyone was dressed for it, well mostly. It was fun romping around on the rocks with another boat's crew. SeaFinn is captianed by Fred and usually his partner who wasn't here at the time, and then takes on 6 or so crew to give an opportunity for people to see what it's like cruising. Sort of like PanExplore with S/V SeaDragon. The current list of swabs aboard were a fun group from a few different places and they'd all done the 10 day trip direct from the Bahamas to Shelburne and so it was fun recounting how the trip was.
Nova Scotia didn't dissapoint with it's over cast views of silvery sky and clear but cold looking water. We flew the kite for a bit and generally just sort of wandered around amidst chatting on the beach. Their new to them dog Coconut was also out and about. Eventually we sort of all rounded back at the dinghy and headed back to our respective boats with a plan to try fishing later as Sam, one of the SeaFinn crew members, is a keen fisherman.
Fishin'
We haven't fished really at all off the new boat as we were sort of focused on getting south initially and then were sitting still workin'. Fred, who's been through a number of times, said we were too far north now for trolling when sailing so really what we are going to be doing until we are back south of like the Azores is going to be jigging. Perfect, we have a spin-cast rod now and some jigging bits so the SeaFinn crew came over to our boat to see what sort of lures we had and to set something up for jigging.
With our rod and one of theirs in hand we took off in SeaFinn's tender and just drifted around in the wind jigging along the bottom for a while. Classic, we didn't catch anything, but it was a fun experience as most of the SeaFinn crew hadn't fished before. Heather actually got a quick bite but she froze up in astonishment before it got off.
Petite Hike/Island
When looking around on the chart for where there were rocks we could fish off of I saw that someone had added a small trail as a marker on the tiny island we were between. As we weren't catching much we decided it'd be cool to step ashore and see what was there. It was a squishy start in the tidal waters but then it was a fun 15 or so minute trail out to a light house. Real exploring! Well, sort of but it was a cool walk to do for sure.
It was getting semi late-ish now and we had made joint dinner plans so we were dropped back off aboard Karma so everyone could make a dish to contribute.
A SeaFinn Dinner
After baking some pretzel bread that we do oh so well we headed over to a very surpising dinner of lobster caught in the Bahamas and then a chicken and rice dish that were oh so tasty! Thank's again for having us over that was an awesome meal. it was a fun time hanging aboard, watching the sunset from the saloon of the Formosa 56, and talking about the trip north, where to stop, what to see, what to look out for, and the like. All very helpful information as Fred has gone this way a number of times and definitely knows the lay of the land/sea.
Knowing we were going to depart early we headed back around 10, late still as the sun is setting now well into the 21h00 hour. The wind was good tomorrow, the plan was to make Halifax if possible but if not there were a few other nice spots near by we could reach.
