Enetai - Nova Scotia Cruise, 2017
4 weeks, 715 nautical miles.
This cruise was the final segment of our circumnavigation of New England and part of Atlantic Canada on the so-called Downeast Loop. The other segments can be accessed through the Sailing page.
Originally planned as a three year, three segment (or three leg) circumnavigation, we took four years and enjoyed nearly every minute. Planning, purchasing charts, and getting ready added to the fun.
We hope you will enjoy reading this narrative. We crammed in a lot of detail. Some might find that all the photos bring it to life. Others might find it tedious. We would be gratified if other people planning to cruise Nova Scotia find it useful.
We gave ourselves four weeks to sail around Nova Scotia. This turned out to be a little too tight; we could have used another week or two to explore some of the harbors we sailed past. It is not a matter of boat speed. It is more a matter of how many harbors and beautiful anchorages you are willing to (or, with constraints of time, must) pass by.
We divided this Nova Scotia narrative into 4 parts to make it more readable (use the menu bar or links below to access each part). We've taken the tourist map of Nova Scotia (below, for reference) and used its color-coded divisions to divide our narrative into zones that match each part. Pretty neat!
- Part One: Bay of Fundy (lavender) and Yarmouth & Acadian Shores (yellow)
- Part Two: South Shore and Halifax (coral)
- Part Three: Eastern Shore (teal)
- Part Four: Northumberland Shore (orange)
We also have this interactive map that shows our actual GPS track. How cool is that? You can zoom way in and see every detail.
The Nova Scotia coast is known for being foggy. Radar would be nice but it's big for a small boat like ours and we do without. We carry fixed and hand-held chart plotters onboard. This year we added an AIS transponder in anticipation of fog. The AIS sends our location and course information to nearby ships, boats and the Coast Guard. It receives this same information from surrounding vessels and displays it on the chart plotter.
We have a deLorme (now Garmin) inReach satellite tracker. The deLorme has 2-way text messaging by satellite which has been extremely useful on occasion when we are out of cell service which is most of the time.
Notes:
Although the narrative is in Bo's voice, We worked together to write this up.
See the Reference page for navigation information.
FEEDBACK
We would really appreciate feedback on these pages - please provide any comments or criticisms you might have about this page (i.e., Is it readable? Interesting? Boring?...) Name and email are optional. Thanks, -Bo