Sailing the Bras D'Or Lakes - Day 1 & 2

I'm off on a sailing adventure!!

First time in 2 years since I've been sailing.

My last sailing adventure started in St. Peter's, South West side of the Bras D'Or Lakes. This time we decided to start from the opposite side in North Sydney and sail around to Baddeck.

Here's some of the photo's I've taken of day 1 and 2. And here's also a little story to go along as I'm sitting here on day 3, in the middle of lakes surrounded by the stars, typing this out.

The motor sounded a little sluggish when we started so we ended up running it for a while to see if we could clean it out. It seems there was some throttle adjustment that needed to be done, but it was still good we gave it a good run as we got going. If anything, it assured us that it was going to run good for the time being if we opened it up.

Even though it was the start of August, this was the first time the boat was on the water because it was waiting for some paint to be finished - and you know how life can get in the way from finishing those projects.

As we came into the channel leading into the entrance, we noticed the wind coming down the channel quite strong. The current going out was also quite fast. We thought it would be going the other way and it would just pull us down, but that wasn't the case.

We got to McKinnon's Cove at a good time. This was halfway to our initial trip to Baddeck. We thought it wouldn't be that bad to tuck into the cove, cook supper, and grab some sleep but boy, were we wrong. Ducking in there and anchoring was no problem. As it was my first anchor in 2 years it seemed to go well. The wind was fairly strong pushing into shore. Not strong enough to be concerned about, but it was stronger than a regular evening breeze. We cooked up some steaks on the BBQ and it was enjoyable being on the boat since it had been such a break.

Later when we were packing it in, @davidkingns mentioned that I should turn on the anchor alarm on my phone. I had forgot all about it, but thought it was a good idea except it was a little annoying during a false alarm.

You see, the anchor alarm will set a radius around where your boat is and if you drift outside the circle, an alarm goes off warning you. The problem with this is one, you can't adjust the alarm noise so it's always at full volume and not the most pleasant of noises. Two, you sometimes get cellphone GPS errors which causes the alarm to go off. So you have this super annoying and loud noise that just randomly goes off when you're sleeping - not the best situation to want to continually put on. But on the other hand, it's always good to get that warning if your drifting into shore.

Anyway, I turned the alarm on and shortly after we went to bed.

It was about 2 am when the anchor alarm went off. At that time you're all sleep fucked and everything is always a tremendous effort to get out of bed to reacted to a possible situation.

And sure enough there was one. We were slowly drifting into shore, but didn't have a whole lot of time left before we hit. We jumped out of bed and started scurrying around to get things started up. We were about 6 inches from washing up on short when we managed to get the engine started and reverse out of the situation.

It was so close I was just about ready to jump in the water and start trying to push us back out.

Oh man, what a close one. We narrowly escaped washing up on shore and nothing at all actually happened from the incident. We just turned around and headed off. What luck!

With the crisis averted we noticed the wind had picked up considerably and was pushing right down the cove we were staying at. We wouldn't be able to stay the rest of the night and had to push on a bit.

We ended up heading a few miles up the lakes to Otter Island. It was one of the only places we were able to duck into where the wind wasn't beating on us. We were able to anchor again with no issue and managed to get a few more hours sleep before we'd have to continue on.

The first night out had almost ended in disaster, but instead nothing happened.

We did get to go under the Seal Island Bridge in the pitch dark, which was an experience. We could hardly see anything and had to navigate our way by only the buoys lighting our way on the water and safely under the bridge. But, we made that too so it's all good.

We got up and sailed a bit up the large channel the next day. It was still kind of windy, but nearly perfect for sailing. We tacked back and forth a bit up this narrow part of the lake for a while. Because it was the first time having the boat in the water, there were some things to sort out while we went, but it was a good sail. Because we had been up so late the night before, we eventually decided to motor the rest of the way to Baddeck so we could get our mooring and sort ourselves out for the next day.

The marina is a nice sheltered spot that's great for making a sort of basecamp to sail out of for a few days. It's fairly central to the lake but you could sail for 2 days in multiple directions without reaching the end of the lakes, as we had to do to get in there.

All considered, it was a good 2 days to get the boat in as planned - or as close to as planned as possible.

I'm just finishing up day 3 as I type this and it was awesome. @landonator was with us today and the weather turned out great.

Stay tuned for day 3 and 4 photos when I get a decent internet signal to get the pictures uploaded.