After spending 4 days on Prince Edward Island, it was time to leave and start towards Halifax, Guidance’s next major stop. Anne was not able to join for this leg of the journey because she is going back to Minneapolis to work.
Jim, Thibaud, and Alexandre left on Thursday just before noon — as soon as the wind had abated enough to get off the dock in the marina. With a little group effort, including Anne pulling on a line from shore to help get Guidance pointed correctly, we were underway.
We had good winds for the first five hours or so and made great progress, including sailing under the Confederation Bridge, which links PEI to New Brunswick (the bridge is 8 miles long). Eventually the winds started to die and we switched on the motor.
We motored through the night, taking turns keeping an eye on things while the others rested. We made very rapid progress, arriving at our planned anchorage 4 hours sooner than Jim had planned. Because we were making such good progress, we decided to push on.
We passed through the lock at Canso Canal, which allowed us to cut between Cape Breton Island and the mainland of Nova Scotia. We had all of our lines and fenders prepared for the lock, but didn’t need them because the water level wasn’t different enough to require us to fully stop in the lock. We simply entered the lock, waited a couple minutes as they closed the door behind us and then they opened the door in front of us. We didn’t notice any change in the water level.
Once through the canal we continued another 25 nm to the town of Canso and dropped anchor almost exactly 24 hours after we left PEI.
