What a change from yesterday! We motor sailed for the first couple of hours, then shut that engine off and sailed all the rest of the way - not without incident, however...

The wind was light and behind us to start with. We put up the main and the yankee, and then thought, "Why don't we try out the DRS (drifter reaching spinnaker) that has been stored in our aft cabin for this whole trip?" Well - it was another "learning experience."

When we had used it before, I sat down with the book and figured out what should be attached to what, and we had reasonable success. We had purchased a new chute for it, in order to make putting it up and down more manageable and instead of thinking the attachment points all through again, we just blithely hoisted it up, attached a sheet (line - not something you put on a bed) to each bottom corner (clue and tack) and hauled up the chute. It billowed out beautifully with all its green and yellow and orange and white colours brilliant in the sun, and we roared ahead. But then when we decided to make some adjustments to the way we were using it, we ran into trouble. The short story is that we got it all tangled up in the rigging, tearing it in several places and made a total hash of the whole procedure. Drat!

We eventually got it hauled down, stuffed in the bag and put back in the aft cabin. Add one more job to the to do list. Sail repair tape will fix the rips - maybe I can make pretty shapes and the repairs will look like they are supposed to be there? We'll figure out a plan for handling it and try again.

The good thing is that the wind increased and the angle changed so we were able to put the yankee back out and fly along for the rest of the day. Once again, because we were headed for Halifax like horses back to the barn, we opted to anchor just inside Lunenburg Bay rather than go all the way in to Lunenburg town. The chart showed a little indentation just around the corner from the Ovens - wonderful cave formations - that would give us good shelter from the SW wind and so we drifted in there and stopped for the night. It is wonderfully freeing to realize that we don't have to always stop where a book or a chart says we can. (Or maybe there is a book that mentions this one - we discovered that our NS guidebooks and charts are in Ottawa! Thank goodness we could borrow charts from Cousin Russ!) Spindler Cove made a perfect anchorage for the night, and a good spot to start out again on Monday for the last leg of this trip.