I love autopilots.
Quite the trip back from Halifax to Newport, I must say. Don Miller and I drove to Halifax in a four-cylinder Tacoma, which made some of the steeper grades challenging, and we determined that there’s a lot of nothing between here and there. Although I’d been to Halifax before, I’d never been anywhere except for the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, which is well out of Halifax proper, and the airport, which is way the hell out of Halifax proper. It’s a nice city, although the hotel staff tend to not understand what the word “reservation” means. When we finally did get to a room in a nicer hotel (A Marriott on the waterfront) than the one that screwed us, it was great, and had a phenomenal restaurant next door, a steak place that served outstanding burgers, cold beer, and attractive waitstaff.
The next morning we went to a super grocery store that wasn’t, and bought our supplies for the trip. After a few hours waiting around the Yacht Squadron, Peter Rugg and Joe Cooper, who had raced (and won) the doublehanded division arrived at the Club, cleared customs, got inspected, and began consuming barley based beverages, as you do after 91 hours of drifting towards Canada in a J/105.
The view from the terrace deck of our hotel in Halifax. A mega yacht sits next to the HMCS Sackville, a Canadian-built Flower-class corvette, one of the stalwarts of the early days of the Battle for the Atlantic in WW II. Out of the two, I prefer the Sackville, which is the last surviving Flower-Class corvette left in the World.
Tomorrow I’ll get into the details of our very interesting 450-mile delivery. Melted wiring, blown-up batteries, a new harbor discovered, oily seas, and how well a J/105 motors into a headwind and a chop. For now, I’m going racing.
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