Two weeks later- What we have been up to while the boat dried out – Part 1.

“43:45.856N 65:19.626W”

7722 Miles since leaving Sandwich.

20^th June 2023

I got the mileage from leaving Sandwich wrong in my last entry and have corrected it here. In my defence I did have bigger issues on my mind when I last put pen to paper.

Two weeks have passed since our dramatic arrival in Shelburne and Tony flew back to the UK yesterday which brought all the emotions of the rescue back to the surface again. It doesn’t matter how much you rationalise your actions, or rerun events in your mind doing the how would I do it again exercises, the end result is always the same; I made the choices and I put Norma and Tony in harms way. I can’t think of anything that I would have done differently given the information I had available at the time but simply by choosing to sail on the deep ocean, which let’s face it was my dream more than anyone else, the end result was that we could have died out there and that is a very sobering thought.  Anyway, that is how I feel but being an Englishman of a certain age, I have a solution. I will take a firm grip on all of those emotions and feelings of guilt towards Norma, Tony, Gemma and family, bunch them all up into a tight ball and bury them so deeply that I will never have to speak of them again. I really can’t see a downside to that plan, onwards and upwards.

After a couple of days Spectra was sorted enough for us to look outwards again and to be honest, we really needed to get ashore for a while. As I have said before Shelburne is a lovely and friendly place but it is also oh so isolated. No Train, No Bus, and No Taxi services are available, but they do have a community face book. Tony found an Enterprise car hire firm in Hebbville which had a car available but would not deliver it the 125 Km to Shelburne. A request was placed on the community Facebook page and within the hour a lady called Linda contacted Tony and said that as she was currently evacuated because of the fire she had nothing to do and would be able to run him over the next day, what a star. Later that day when we went for a walk a chap mowing his lawn called us over and asked if we were the English people with the broken boat. We had a chat about the town and his lovely allegedly haunted historic house, which was known as the drip house, (original owner, not leaking roof), he of course knew that Linda was taking us to Hebbville. Early the next morning another chap called Rick knocked on the boat and offered to take us to Hebbville once he had finished walking his dog as that would save Linda the trouble, are you getting the picture now. The next day Tony and Norma were picked up at 1100 by Linda as arranged and whisked off to get us a car. Tony managed to charm the Enterprise manager and get us an upgrade from the Mitsubishi that we had booked to a Dodge Charger for the same money. After picking up some doughnuts and coffee from Tim Hortens (which is a Canadian version of little chef and is to be found everywhere) a very happy Tony and Norma arrived back at Spectra in style.  While they had been away, I met with the surveyors and got that process underway, all in all it was a very successful day.

Now we know we are in North America

My 60^th Birthday came and went with two particular highlights. Gemma organised a beer tasting tour of the Boxing Rock brewery in Shelburne for us including a meal and taster session which always goes down well, pun intended. In typical Nova Scotia/Shelburne fashion when Tony said that he wasn’t on the tour as he doesn’t drink, they said don’t worry about it come along anyway there is no charge. It wasn’t exactly a tour more of a sit down and drink the beer while the nice lady told us about the products which was just what the doctor ordered. She also introduced us to all flavour crisps, which as the name suggests have all of the flavours of all of the crisps in the world on each crisp, why I don’t know because you couldn’t taste anything for at least 5 minutes after eating each one.

Beer tasting is a good thing to do on your birthday.

After the beer tasting we went to the yacht club and of course in the worst kept secret in the world Norma had organised a cake which we shared with the locals.

Having got the survey out of the way we had some free time and decided to do a road trip: We drove for over 2000 km in a week and visited many and varied places in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward islands and had a right good unwind while we, were at it. To be honest the order of the visits has got a bit mixed up in my mind as we did tend to zig zag a lot but here goes.

Lockeport: This was the nearest fishing village south of Shelburne and is a centre for the lobster industry. The drive down showed us the very real devastation caused by the forest fires which burnt 24,900 hectares of forest, 60 homes were destroyed and over 150 structures damaged, it wasn’t officially put out until 3 days after we arrived. Notably when the forest fires were raging the Shelburne fishing fleet had been ordered to return to and stay in harbour. With only one week of the fishing season left the boats were trapped in harbour with their catches and no means of landing them as the roads were closed. The Lockeport fleet voluntarily sailed down the coast and picked up the Shelburne catch before returning it to Lockeport for processing.  As I have said before they have proper self-supporting communities in this area.

The water near to Lockeport, crystal clear and very cold.

A survivor of the fires, a Musk Rat crossed the road as we drove out of town.

Nova Scotia by the sea.