Bonny's Travels and Travails: Beddeck to Deadman's Cove, La Hune Bay, Newfoundland, via Otter Island

OCC crews gathered in Beddeck: L/R Michi (Ti' Ama), Mike & Nicci (Zen Again), Steff (T' Ama), Me, Brett (Lalinea)

On Tuesday I did a few jobs on the boat including re-marking the anchor chain. Most of Mick's very professional paint job done in Vigo had worn off. I was on a mooring and so the chain was not in use but I didn't have time to do a good paint job so I just tied some brightly coloured bits of string on the necessary parts of the chain (at 10, 20 and 30 metres), the painted mark at 40 metres and the long red one for the bitter end warning at 47 metres, were both still in good condition.

Somehow the day disappeared and it was time to do a bit of shopping. First stop was the chandlery to buy 200 feet of floating polypropylene rope for mooring the boat to shore. In some places in Newfoundland, an anchor (or 2) plus a line ashore, is the most suitable arrangement.

It's necessary to use floating rope when taking a line ashore in the dinghy because the weight of sinking rope can make the task impossible. Polypropylene is light and strong and of course floats but it's horrible stuff to work with and will get itself in all sorts of tangles. This is what happened in the Chandlery. It took me and the young man serving me about 30 minutes to untangle my 200 feet from the basket it was in! We then tied it up in a coil and was just able to get the coil into the cockpit locker. I'm not looking forward to coiling and stowing it again after use!

After shopping I had time for a 30 minute snooze before meeting up with the other OCC crews at the yacht club. I'd met them all before with the exception of Brett another very well travelled Aussie. He and his wife who had family matters to attend to and so didn't come out, first met up with Mike and Nicky in Chesapeake Bay earlier in the year.

Yet another very enjoyable evening was had swapping stories and future plans. Bret and his wife are staying in the lake for another week or so and I've forgotten where after that; Michi and Steff have to stay in Beddeck a few days to wait for parts to be delivered and to get some work carried out on the boat and after that will head for New Foundland before going south again to the USA for the winter and then north once again with their eyes on Greenland. Zen Again will also be heading for New Foundland before heading south to the Azores. Their long journey back to Oz may include the Canaries, The Cape Verdes and the Patagonia channels as well as a host of other places! I may see them in the UK in the winter when they visit family and friends by plane from the Canaries (they spent 18 months there on their boat working in London and Hull, a few years ago).

The next morning (Wednesday 17/7) Bonny and Zen Again, headed up the Great Bras D'or to Otter Harbour, a useful staging post to wait for the outflowing current to help one back out into the Atlantic Ocean. We were chased by some squally weather which clipped us along the route but by the time we got to Otter Harbour at around midday the sun was out and it was another warm day.

Once we had anchored and sorted the boats out, Mike and Nicci (with homemade cake) came over for coffee and afterwards we explored our surroundings in our dinghies. A pretty place and Mike and Nicci did see an Otter!

In the evening we had drinks on Zen Again and then I returned to Bonny and hoisted the dinghy on deck in preparation for an early departure the next morning.

Zen Again will spend another night there in order to meet up with other OCC friends who were on their way up the lake.

My sailing time in Canada is coming to an end for this year and so I'm keen to press on and see some of Newfoundland. I have to get back to St Peter's in early August in order to lay the boat up there before I fly home on the 18th.

There's a lot to do to lay the boat up and prepare her for a Nova Scotia winter. The mast has to come down - a complicated process, especially given the various wires and cables that run up it to the radar, vhf antenna and the lights. All water has to be drained out of tanks, engine, and watermaker and in some cases replaced with antifreeze, the diesel tank needs to be either drained or completely filled and batteries need to go into warm storage. There will undoubtedly be other things to do as well and therefore the plan is to get back to St Peter's by the 8th of August.

That gives me three weeks to get to the south coast of Newfoundland, explore a few places and return. The passage out - about 170 nautical miles - from Otter Island, will take about a day and half with a mostly fresh prevailing south westerly wind off the starboard quarter, but the return to Saint Peter's will probably take much longer. Unless I get lucky and get a convenient window with winds from somewhere between the north west through to the south east, I'll have beat back which will take a few days. To be safe, if there's no such window in the offing, I may need to start back after only a week!

The forecast for Thursday and Friday was for generally fresh south westerly winds. So after stowing the dinghy and eating dinner (the last of some leftovers) I set the alarm for 0600 and got a reasonably early night with the intention of leaving at 0700 and getting to the Bridge a few miles up the Great Bras D'Or by 0800. I'd worked out that by then there should be the last dregs of an adverse current running and that by the time I reached the narrows at the exit of the Great Bras D'or, it should have turned in my favour. The reality though, was rather different. We had current in our favour up to just before the bridge when it switched to a strong counter current of about 2 knots. Once through the bridge the current was in our favour until 'the narrows', when it once again ran strongly against us. Again, once through, it ran in our favour. Very strange behaviour indeed! I can only imagine that as the ebbing tide flows through the constrictions at the bridge and 'The Narrows' strong eddies are formed that flow against the tidal stream. Fortunately, we only had neap tides to contend with, otherwise it might have been rather more of a challenge to get out of the lake!

Up until the exit at the narrows I'd been motoring with the genoa poled out. I didn't want to have to contend with the mainsail just in case the current made the boat difficult to control. Once through the narrows (around 0930) I hoisted the mainsail with 1 reef, switched off the engine and set a course across the Laurentian Channel between Cape Breton and Newfoundland, of 080° Magnetic for La Hune Bay.

For the first 6 hours or so the wind varied in strength and direction from south west to south and eventually fell so light in very sloppy seas that I shook out the reef. A few hours later it freshened and held direction just west of south in line with the forecast and so I put the reef back in. We made good progress and by 2030 on Thursday, had covered 70 of the 170 miles to La Hune Bay. IF we can maintain this speed for the duration of the crossing, we should be in Deadman's Cove, La Hune Bay by tomorrow (Friday) afternoon.

The Cruising Club of America's Guide to Newfoundland, describes La Hune Bay, thus:

"La Hune Bay and Deadman's Cove in particular (near its entrance) represent one of the spectacularly beautiful places that you really should not miss along the Southwest Coast."

The visibility has been good so far (up to 2000 hrs) but fog is forecast along the Newfoundland coast.

As dusk fell the wind picked up further and so I tucked another reef in just to be on the safe side. Very glad I did too, because within the hour it was blowing pretty hard - around 30 knots I estimated - and Bonny was screaming along at 7-8 knots and surfing down some waves at 9-10 knots, the highest speeds I've seen. However, the wind was forecast to drop some 40 miles or so off the coast and so whilst the night was pretty much a sleepless one, with the alarm set at every 15 minutes to lookout, check the radar and the course; it was good to cover as much ground as possible overnight in order to get there in daylight the next day.

As it turned out, by 0730 on Friday the wind had died so much that we were down to a crawl with barely enough way to hold our course in a very sloppy sea and so reluctantly I turned the engine on and we continued under power at about 4.5 knots. That should get us in by around 1500. A far cry from the 1000 hrs predicted by the chartplotter when we were hurtling along at 7-8 knots, but it will be daylight, which is the main thing. By 0730, with about 30 miles to go, the high coast was visible every now and then through the mist.

Breakfast was porridge with Despina's mum's home made strawberry jam - delicious!

The last 8 hours under power in the fog were pretty tedious but eventually La Hune Head reared up out of the fog....