The passage to Liverpool was not as pleasant as we had hoped. The weekend forecast had a shelf-life of less than six hours, it seemed.

After a quiet night at the summer house in Stonehurst, we woke to find a family of deer enjoying a breakfast of apples from the same tree that we had picked enough to make an apple crisp dessert for last night's dinner.

We parted company with Pierre and Marie-Anne, who returned to their boat Morgengry in Lunenburg, and we added our daughters' friends Robyn and Alix to the crew for this leg.

A dreary and lumpy start to the day, winds out of the SW at 10 knots, and it stayed on the nose the whole day. The sun finally broke out at noon, and as we entered Liverpool Bay the wind shifted more to the west and brought warmer air. We secured alongside Brooklyn Marina at 1430, and had lunch. We topped up the fuel tank, and Robyn and Alix's mother Clare drove back to Halifax along with her girls and myself, as I must work until 19 October, when I can permanently join the boat. Until then, I'll be shuttling back and forth between Halifax and wherever the boat is to do weekend passages, with the intent of sailing to Maine from Yarmouth on the (Canadian) Thanksgiving weekend.

Liverpool is a port of interest to me as it is here, in 1761, that my ancestor Richard Kempton settled after leaving his home in Massachusetts. As a volunteer in a New England Artillery Company, he fought at the Battle for Quebec at the Plains of Abraham in September, 1759. He would no doubt have sailed to Halifax and then on to Quebec with General Wolfe's army, possibly even stopping in Liverpool en route, which may have prompted him to decide to re-locate, further enticed by a land grant from the British government for his service.

A generation later, some of Richard's descendants were privateers in the War of 1812, with Liverpool serving as an important privateer base (the image above is of the Liverpool Packet). It is not impossible that they may even have fought against American members of their family, as there is a Daniel Kempton, of the USS Saratoga, who died in November, 1814 in the British prison on Melville Island in Halifax (today the site of Armdale Yacht Club). He is buried at Deadman's Island, which is literally metres away across the cove from our waterfront house on the Northwest Arm. That Nova Scotian and New England branches of the same family would be on opposite sides in the War of 1812 would not be an uncommon occurence, just as the American Revolution forced many loyalists to move to Nova Scotia fron the American colonies.