After some rest, we were hopeful for a good sailing day with some better winds. After weighing anchor we were under way and had the sails up making good way out of the anchorage. Unfortunately the wind wasn't quite as northerly as we had hoped, and so we were very closed hauled to make our way to Lunenburg. This is not always a bad point of sail for us, but the waves were large and we were really bashing into it. To make matters worse, the winds were very gusty, and this is what makes this challenging. We made good way with full genoa and double reefed main (our seemingly favourite sail plan on the boat as of late), but the gusts were getting too much to handle so we decided to give the gale sail a go.

After rigging it, and going to a single reef in the main, it seemed like the winds were down again. It's always hard to tell if the winds were actually down, or we were just too slow, but ugh. Being too slow in large waves is rather painful, and so we dropped the gale sail, and put out the genoa again. This was much better, but then wind built a bit, and we double reefed the main again. At this point we were getting pretty tired as it was a lot of sail changes, and pretty uncomfortable bashing through waves.

This is when Aria noticed that our lower shroud was off, dangling in the wind. Yikes. I've always found the lower shrouds get pretty loose when the sails are heavily loaded (even when they are well tensioned), and so I guess the split ring managed to back off. Of course the clevis pin was gone overboard, but thankfully we had spare and were able to get it back on while underway. I think I need to tape those split rings. I have been checking them regularly as I clean them with freshwater, but either I didn't see it, or it just all happened on this sail.

So of course the wind built even more as we starting getting close to Lunenburg, so we reefed up the genoa a bit. I always find I can't get any good shape on the genoa when it's reefed, especially upwind, but only reefing it tiny bit (only a single furl or so) seemed to work ok, and we continued on with that sail plan tacking up towards Lunenburg.

As we approached we saw a very large tall ship on the horizon and as we got closer in realized it was the Bluenose II! Super cool watching it sail the bay as we tacked up closer and closer. It's a pretty amazing looking vessel on the water with it's sails up. It was handling the wind much better than we were! Eventually we came up right by it working our way up the bay.

We finally got into the bay and dropped our sails and headed in to see where we could moor up. All the docks looked full, and after some poking around we decided to call and picked up a mooring ball from the Boat Locker, a local chandlery that has several mooring balls. After trying to find the right one, and finally failing and picking up the wrong one, we tied up and called the Boat Locker, and it was fine the one we ended up on, and so here we are. It was later in the evening and so we decided to just stay a second day, and make tomorrow our time to row into town.

So one last boat project to cap another long day, I replaced the failing joker valve on the head.

Theone made a nice dahl for dinner, and then I passed out super early for a full 12 hours of deep sleep. Hard upwind sailing for the entire day is rather exhausting!