Back in Halifax
We arrived with a number of things to do on the ole boat job list as one does when they arrive in an actual city. Seems like since we've set off from Newport we've mainly been taking weather windows and fixing/arranging things when waiting for them. Here in Halifax we had the following things to sort.
The List
- Aquire EPIRB
- Aquire offshore life raft
- Repair broken mainsail cars and battons
- Modify lazyjacks to be adjustable at mast base
- Seal diesel stove flue through the coachroof
- Service all the winches (holy dooley)
- Make cockpit sun/wind/rain cover
- Laundry
- I'm sure there was more
The People
This is far more important and argueable more interesting to read about as well. Being a city that means other friendly yachts are around and there are friendly people ashore! Judy is a must see from when we were here last time. She is a cruiser with a house righ on the Armdale bay who understands the needs and desires of her fellow yachtspeople and therefore is extremely helpful and friendly. Someone else, just recently mentioned here, is the crew from SV O'dara. Having made us pancakes aboard O'dara before they left Shelburne it was our time to repay the favor. Of course then we'd meet other friendlies as they sail in and inevetabley distract us from the ever ongoing list as demonstrated above.
Our second night in the bay O'dara pulls in and immediately asks if we want to go downtown for some free salsa lessons, "sure!" Halifax is definitely different this time of year as it warms up instead of nearing the end of October while it cools down. Way busy downtown with people and events going on everywhere. The salsa lesson was just out in the public square along the waterfront. A classic cruiser suggestion, we each had a beer from a convience store sitting in the waterfront plaza before the lesson started and we were off to the races. Partners changed so we all rotated around about the 40 or so participants. Very neato. We organized our repayment pancake breakfast for the following day aboard Karma with the whole O'dara crew.
Another awesome character we met was Robert aboard his Contessa 32, SY Silver Harmony who, already having crossed his outward track from Scotland, arrived from Bermuda to Canada as his final destination before returning back across the Atlantic finishing a lap south of the capes. We spent a few different days wandering around town with him, hanging at Judy's place, and aboard both ours and his yacht exchanging stories and mainly listening to all the neato places he'd been and fun stories that come with going to out of the way places aboard.
Being we are in the area a bit off the tropics that means there are more insteresting yachts around. The first of which was an aluminum centerboarder sailed by Christophe, SY Apsara, hailing from France. Very friendly fellow who mainly sails solo. We'd end up running into him in France (St. Pierre et Miquelon actually) later on. We also met Whalie Bird hailing from Belgium and Farel hailing from France. Farel had a super cool crew of two who are heading north in hopes of freezing over in the Canadian Arctic. Whalie Bird we'd end up buddy boating with quite a bit after running into them again in St. Pierre as well.
We are off!
Northbound again. A nice, not as nice as we thought but hey what can you do, weather window came along having us depart originally direct for St. Pierre et Miquelon, 3 days sailing away.
The List By Job
Realizing this gets both tedious to read and to write, I'll include some photos of projects but the details in the written word, whatever. Boat jobs, upside down in strange compartments, dropping 400 ball bearings on the deck we didn't know existed, waiting far longer than we wanted for spares to arrive, you get the jist. It all got done and we sailed out of Halifax with a mini refit complete!
Aquire EPIRB and Liferaft
Something we probably should have done before we left, but we just sort of came to the conclusion that it'd be worth having and as we are in a city with heaps of yachting equipment what better place to get this pretty standard equipment.
Liferaft
The liferaft wasn't too hard actually. When passing through before we found a Facebook Marketplace listing for freshly certified life rafts of varying sizes available in town. I had saved the contact as getting one with a 3 year certification just before we sat still in port for 6 months seemed silly.
Jason from SeaPro Marine in Dartmouth wrote back right away and even remembered us. We purchased a 4 person Zodiac liferaft from him where once we decided he then started the certification so it was a fresh as possible and also we knew the quality of the raft. It was good to hear that whilst we were waiting Judy, on her own accord, independently brought up Jason and SeaPro as being a really reliable and quality place for yacht safety equipment. That was nice to hear! Jason brought the raft down to us even at the Armdale Rotary where we talked for a bit, exchanged information about this blog (hey Jason!) and got to see some really cool videos of larger commercial liferafts being inflated with their integrated slides and stuff for multi-story ferries and the like.
EPIRB
This turned out to be a semi large annoyance. EPIRBs are international but apparently are to be purchased in the same country of which the owning yacht is registered such that it is faster to contact the emergency contact numbers if it were to be activated. Okay… no dramas in theory, except of course internationally traveling yachts, the sort who would be interested in offshore safety equipment, are by definition rarely in their country of registration…
Due to these being highly regulated there are essentially a few companies that all are pretty much the same thing selling slightly different colored versions of the same product everywhere around the world. Different colored versions but also hard-coded to say where they were bought. That meant we couldn't just walk into the famous Halifax Binnacle and purchase one off the shelf. We had to get the exact same one sent to us from the USA as Karma is a yankie.
ACR's site makes this seem possible but we continually ran into issue after issue with payments being turned down likely as the exact SKU of what we were ordering was available in the States but not Canada. We'd call and get the helpful Valerio on the line who understands that we want the USA stuff, just sent to Canada, but the computer didn't get that. What ended up working, after a week of failed transactions (the very week we were expecting initially to wait for shipping) was ordering the stuff to an arbituary address in the US, then calling Valerio right away, and having him just physically pack up stuff and bring it to the post office and have it mailed to Canada. We don't know what the shipping cost on that was because we got it comp'ed for all our trouble, but it was probably more than they were excepting.
Overall nice people individually, just was frustrating to have such a headache aquiring something internationally which is literally designed to be used internationally and is a globally accepted thing. Whatever we have it now and boy oh boy are we safe!
