Yesterday Anne spent the entire day driving our rental car to Halifax and back to take Evelyn to a 10-minute dental follow-up visit. Of course they did other things while they were there (Leslie went too), but that was the reason for spending eight hours driving...Anne was a wee bit tired when they got back! In compensation, she got to sit on the back porch (our boat's cockpit) with me and enjoy this fabulous sunset...

That sunset marked a number of changes for me. Most noticeable was the change in the weather: It was nice this morning but its been blowing 25+ knots and raining since early this afternoon, thunderstorms are in the forecast tonight, and tomorrow looks pretty snotty too (I expect it will be late Friday before we head off from here). More subtle are small changes in weather and the environment which signal that, while its not yet fall, the corner has been turned and summer is ending. Then too, we have literally turned the corner of Nova Scotia and are now looking at charts of Maine as our next landfall should be somewhere there, across the Bay of Fundy.

When we originally decided to turn right instead of left and do the Great Loop clockwise rather than counter-clockwise, we had visions of how that would leave us with weeks in which to leisurely explore the coast of Maine before heading south with more determination. However, boats sneer at schedules and instead we've spent weeks visiting ports in Nova Scotia that we hadn't previously, and learning all sorts of fascinating things about small boat propulsion systems!

But now we look at the calendar and the charts and, while we don't have to rush, we do need to move south with a little more consistency than we have been doing...In the Grand Scheme, five years ago, we didn't leave Rhode Island until early October and we got plenty cold before we reached Florida as a result! So now, we're looking at things and thinking we'd like to be somewhat ahead of that pace this time. Will we succeed? Only time will tell, but we've turned the corner from a slow summer cruise to the start of the fall migration...