I am writing this from a coffee shop in Portland Maine, our new land-based home. Defying logic, we have migrated north rather than south in retirement, surely a sign of faulty genetics or yankee stubbornness. Our house in Montclair NJ is sold and we have parted with the community which has been a center of our lives for 3+decades. All quite bittersweet - thankfully we have had the distraction of our upcoming sailing season to take our minds off of the move.

And it should be an exciting summer of sailing! Our goal is to complete the Atlantic circuit that we started in May 2021, sailing the northern route across the Atlantic from Maine to Scotland.



We will spend May and the first half of June outfitting the boat and going on a shakedown cruise to Halifax Nova Scotia. We will leave the boat there for 1-1/2 weeks while we take part in our son Colin's Colorado wedding, then return to Halifax for our final preparation for the crossing. We are very fortunate that our buddies Tasha and Douglas have cast aside common sense and will join us for this second Atlantic passage together. Here's Tasha modeling the latest fashion in cold water survival suits.


We expect to start looking for a weather window to cast off from Halifax around July 1, and anticipate that we will complete the 2600 mile crossing to Oban Scotland by the end of July. We then hope to spend August exploring the coast of the Scottish inner Hebrides. The town of Kirkcudbright was the only point we hit in Scotland on our last passage, and we are excited to experience more of the Scottish coast and maybe visit a distillery or two.


Then we transit to the east coast of Scotland via the Caledonian Canal. We look forward to having our daughter Katherine and boyfriend Dave as well as the adventurous Roses, Maggie and Bill, join us as crew for our Scottish exploits. Any other takers? Let us know if you will be on the Scottish west coast in August. Time and weather permitting, we will then sail across the North Sea to spend the early fall in Norway and Sweden, where we expect to store the boat for the winter.

Picking the right weather window for our Atlantic crossing will be a challenge. Too early and we risk running into icebergs travelling south from Greenland on the Labrador Current. It turns out that 2023 has been quite a prolific year for icebergs, and we will need to monitor the ice reports from the Canadian Coast Guard's North American Ice Service closely.



If we leave too late we risk running into the remnants of tropical storms which sweep up the east coast of North America before circling toward Northern Europe. Early July seems like the best option to thread this needle. It will be more difficult to avoid the more typical low pressure systems which spin across the Atlantic to Northern Europe during the summer. Leaving these systems to our north should provide good westerly winds and avoid the rougher conditions around their centers but could force us further south than desired, making our lengthy trip even longer.



We expect that much of the first half of the trip will be quite wet and foggy. We will pass close to the Grand Banks, the extension of the continental shelf off of Newfoundland. This area is known to have the foggiest conditions in the world, as the cold Labrador Current from the north mingles with the warm Gulf Stream current from the east creating thick advection fog almost every day. Maintaining a careful watch and constant monitoring of our radar and AIS will be especially necessary during this part of the journey. Once we clear the Grand Banks the weather should clear somewhat and the long days will be an advantage for us - we should have almost 18 hours of daylight for most of our passage.



With this broad outline of our voyage in mind, we have been busily trying to get back into a sailing mindset. We have reviewed and updated our emergency procedures, gleaned advice from others who have done the passage before, prepared a provisioning list for 25 days at sea, and replaced gear that was worn out from last year's adventures. Today we watched as the folks from Front Street Shipyard launched the boat and stepped the mast. All of this preparation should come to a crescendo over the next few weeks.

It will feel good to be back on the water again.