Decision made, or made for us, I think.

After tossing and turning all night, I finally got another download from Clearpoint at 05h00 this morning. Not much change from the last one in the near future, but now we have a look out until Friday and it looks like another damn low is coming down the St Lawrence from Upper Canada bringing high winds to the Maritime waters in the ugly quarter. This means if we don't get out sometime in the next 24 hours we won't have enough time to get across before we are facing that. I have also looked at the wind direction over the next 24 hours and figure that it would be better to leave Shelburne on a rising tide and ride the tide with the wind to Brazil Rock and past it and then get as short respite during the slack before the tide changes. Fortunately so does the wind at that point according to the forecast so the tide and the wind will remain at the same basic direction minimizing the "wall" sea that we could face otherwise. I think that we are prepared to push a couple of knots of current in return for calmer seas. It will only last for six hours and then we will be traveling with the flood again. Of course, soon we will be simply pushed to port or starboard as the tide current will be on our beam. Bottom line is that no matter when we leave, we are going to get poked around a bit so we will be getting the worst over asap.

We made made a pre-departure call to US customs to warn them that we were coming (I can just imagine Homeland Defence mobilizing now!).

I have a feeling that this is going to be a cold and wet one. We'll be in touch in a couple of days.