Today is one of those days for which you are grateful for a weather router. Otherwise you'd be tempted to set off only to get caught in the next tempest that is coming up the coast. Right now it looks like Monday will be our day to jump for the Gulf. Low tide is at 16h30 in Shelburne with is about 30 minutes later at Barrington Passage or Brazil Rock. This means that we should leave here at somewhere around 11h00 to arrive there at the right time. The weather forecast will have us on a run down the rest of the coast and with a tide assist we should get a good push into the Gulf of Maine. As of right now by 21h00 we should be on a broad reach in 20-25 kts which will continue to Tues at 15h00 when it will abate again a little. We will start the trip with the heavy weather jib and have a couple of tucks ready for the main and mizzen. If it gets really smoky we'll just drop the main and continue on the broad reach under reefed mizzen and heavy weather headsail. I think that's a plan, of course that will all depend on the weather.

Last night the Moonlight Maiders had us over for dinner. Heather is an excellent cook and we had a great time. The meal was a joint undertaking with their crewman Jim making an Ethiopian appetizer out of bread dipped in oil and from there to an exotic collection of spices including salt, various peppers, ground hazelnuts, cumin, and coriander and the result was something that was really delicious. Not to be outdone. Heather had prepared a curried chicken with chickpeas served over a bed of rice and accompanied by a nice white wine.

Just before we sat down to eat the shuttle arrived with Barb's computer and with our new chart plotter. Barb spent about 15 minutes in rapture. Apparently my Dell laptop that she had been using was not up to the standards of someone who was used to an HP. Funny, my Dell is 2 years older and I have never had a problem with it. It was the HP that had to go back to the shop. Regardless, with the arrival of the chart plotter, I have some work cut out for me today. At the very least I will have the cockpit navigation back and the RADAR and with any luck I might also have the AIS hooked into it as well.

I was looking at MOONLIGHT MAID's SSB antenna configuration and have decided that it is what I will copy for ours. We both have a split backstay and the difference was that I had insulated only the top portion where the split stops. The result is that I have to put the tuner up in the rigging too to minimize the antenna lead run. MOONLIGHT MAID has isolated the starboard split from about 6 feet up and that becomes the bottom of the antenna. The other split is isolated up near the fork and the antenna ends at the masthead. Brilliant! I can't believe that I was so stupid that I didn't think about that too. This means that I'll be replacing my backstay entirely, but that'll wait until we get home next summer or until we are in one place long enough to be able to take it down and into a rigger's shop.

Today was the day for the Farmer's Market here in Shelburne so off we trotted, shopping bags in hand. It was a nice but almost pointless walk as it turned out that the Farmer's Market had their last day the previous weekend. Rats! You'd think that they'd put up a sign or at least take down the old one, but I guess they count on the locals having the brains to know that they were over for the year, and the visitors, well the visitors will go off and do other things. Too bad. I was looking forward for a poke in fresh veggies or something like that.

Barb reloaded her laptop after the repairs have been made and I took off the sail covers and started to reinstall the jiffy reefing. The forecast now looks for relatively benign conditions on Monday with a 15 knot stern wind to push us along to meet the tide at Brazil Rock at 16h00 where the wind will be on the aft quarter at 20 kts. This will give us a broad reach becoming a beam reach early Tuesday morning and then it will gradually back around to a close reach at 15 kts by Tuesday at 09h00 and then to beating at 10 kts by 15h00. We'll be motoring or at least motor sailing for that time until early Wednesday morning when the wind should veer around again to a close to beam reach at 15 kts for the rest of the trip. We should be getting into Sandwich Point USCG Station before noon on Wednesday.

We got the jiffy reefing in with no problem and moved the boat around to an inside finger pier. The club asked me to do that since there will be another yacht coming in tonight from Halifax. I rather expect that it is Festivus from RNSYS but we'll see. It is 49' long and they thought that he would have an easier time of it if he came in during the dark hours if he could have a large space on the face dock. We have told the club staff that if he calls in again to let them know that we will be at the dock with our radio on and that we'll light his way in if he calls us.