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We were on our way by 0730 this morning; I motored out the river heading for the Atlantic while Joyce made us a nice breakfast. It was a beautiful clear morning with not a drop of wind. Once we were out of the river we went forward and enjoyed the trip on deck, watching the birds and just enjoying life while “Bobby Lee” manned the helm (this is not the eastern shore I remember, the gods are smiling upon us). At 1100hrs I spotted three other sailboats all under motor like us. At 1200hrs I saw a lot of splashing in the water about a mile off the port side bow (I checked the chart for a shoal). As we got a bit closer I realized it was about 50 dolphins after a large school of fish. The air was full of gannets diving as well competing with the dolphins to fill their bellies. I haven’t seen anything quite like it and will remember it for a long time. I didn’t mention it earlier but we did see a bit of sea life on our trip up the shore (Seals, Sun fish, a giant Leather back turtle and tons of birds, mainly gannets). The eastern shore can be quite picturesque when the weather cooperates. At 1330 we unfurled the genoa and at 1349 we rolled it back in as the wind had swung onto our nose. I should have realized as the wind started shifting that something was up by 1415 we were motoring along in overcast conditions with a light rain and a darkening sky. We saw a pretty ominous squall coming our way and would have like to avoid it however were close aboard Egg Island and didn’t have the room to change course. As the dark cloud engulfed Rose Lee the wind went from zero to thirty five knots in less than 30 seconds and the rain wow I have never seen anything like it. We were healing 20 degrees with no sails up as the squall swept over us. Joyce and I didn’t have too much to say during this we just seemed to looking at each other and I imagine we were both thinking wow this is crazy and scary. By 1530 we had navigated through the remainder of the squalls furling our genoa each time just in case, however there was no wind in any of the other squalls just lots of rain. What a crazy day no wind, squalls with mucho wind, squalls without wind, wind on the beam, wind on the nose and now we had 20knots on the beam and were flying along at 8.5. We were considering Owl’s head again but we were making such great time we arrived at the turn for Owl’s head at 1330 which was to early to stop so we made the decision based on our speed to push on for home. We reached the MOA buoy off Halifax Harbour at 1849hrs and turned for home. We arrived safe and sound on our mooring at 2030hrs just in time to grab some Chinese take- out from Fans restaurant before they closed at 0900 suweeeet. We grabbed a beer at the club and brought our take-out treasure back to the boat feeling very satisfied with our day and covering just over 85 nautical miles in thirteen hours. This was our first big trip with the boat and not only did the boat pass with flying colors we did as well!
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