I woke up with the sun this morning and decided not to wait for the bakery to open ashore before departing Grand Case. After my first coffee I started the dishwasher to clean up the collected plates and went out back to get the dinghy engine and fuel tank into the dinghy garage. I’d purchased a 100 foot long line for towing, as the old line was much shorter and starting to shed fibres at an alarming rate and it was time to retire it – this was attached and prepared. With my second cup of coffee I cleaned up the cabin and made ready for the passage, including removing the anchor ball and the boom tie. At 7AM I departed the anchorage, where the winds had gone from dead calm to 25 knots in just a few minutes. The first two hours of the passage were done with 6-7 knots speed, but then the wind died down a bit and the big Atlantic swell had the boat rolling quite a bit. After the speed dropped to 4 knots in light winds and big swell I opted to turn on the engine and motorsailed.
The sun set while I was still over 7 miles from the island, in fact the light disappeared just as I was coming back onto soundings (“off” soundings comes from the old days, when a “sounding” was made using a line with a lead weight attached to the end to determine how deep the water was. If the end of the line was reached without touching bottom, one would be off soundings). While I navigate at night using shore side lights, the GPS chart plotter and the radar, none of those show those nasty fish traps that are strewn about and I had seen traps out there in the past. Luckily I didn’t hit any. I didn’t see any because at about the same time rain started coming down and the darkness was occasionally lit up by flashes of lightning embedded in the clouds. The winds remained at about 17 knots and never got any stronger but I had reefed sails in any case, and dropped those when entering the North Sound channel. I anchored off Prickly Pear island after a 13 hour passage and made a steak with potatoes on the barbie for dinner and then read until my eyes refused to focus any more and fell asleep.
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