This is our biggest passages on the trip so far, and making the hop from Nova Scotia to Maine is a big one for us. We had been watching this weather window for the previous 5 days or so, and as the date neared the it seemed to be materializing nicely for us. One thing we've found we need to watch out for is sea state, especially on this boat. Things get pretty uncomfortable quickly, so a big part of the appeal with this weather window was the low sea state with at least some reasonable winds. We also decided to do the crossing from Shelburne (we left from Cape Negro Island where we anchored out to shave a few hours off the trip). Our other option was to go around the tip of Nova Scotia over to Yarmouth and then do the crossing from there, which is shorter in distance. But we are pretty happy to do a long overnight or two, in order to take this good weather and make more distance quickly.

So, we sailed off anchor at Cape Negro Island around 04:00 EDT which is around nautical dawn, where the sun is still below the horizon but it's light enough navigate. Nice and easy, but slow exit from the anchorage, and then we rounded up to wind and headed on our course.

The predicted weather was all close hauled sailing to start, and then maybe some not entirely close hauled sailing. Turns out, as is often the case, it was all close hauled. Our boat does preform pretty well upwind though, and so this turned out to not be an issue. Upwind in high winds and sea, can be uncomfortable, but upwind in light winds is just beautiful. And that is pretty much what we got. We did the entire crossing with full main and full genoa, only switching to a single reefed main a couple of times. Twice the wind dropped off enough that we turned on the engine, but only for less than an hour each time. Ultimately the winds were pretty consistent.

We made a long tack out, tacked a couple times up wind, and then remained on a single tack the entire way across. The track is pretty wobbly, as we followed the wind as close as we could, and the current pushed and pulled us into and out of the bay of fundy as tracked across it.

Theone and I do pretty well taking shifts on these long passages. I usually get a bit of rest (but not much sleep) in the evening until 11pm or midnight, then I take over from Theone and do a long night shift until 4 or 5am, and then she does a morning shift while I crash hard and sleep like a baby. During the day we kind of just swap on and off as makes sense, and try to get as much rest as possible.

A few highlights from the trip:

• saw a very large pod of whales, maybe right whales? Must have seen 20 or so spouts and quite a few tails up in the air. Not too close to boat which is good, because I'm actually kind of freaked out about whales close to boat.
• had a pod of dolphins swim with the boat in the early morning. This is a pretty amazing thing to see, and first time it's happened where they swim along side us. Watching them jump up beside the boat at the bow is very cool!
• We saw a few other pods of dolphins on the trip as well, but they were doing their thing on a different path than ours. They kind of swim around the boat and continue on their way.
• Theone saw a sea turtle on her watch. I've still never see one in the wild, kind of jealous.
• A cruise ship passed us in the night, about 3 NM off our stern, but oh my, are those things ever lit up! It's almost surreal to see on the ocean. 1000 feet long, 144 foot beam... crazy!
• Lobster pots in Maine are completely insane. We dodged what seemed like an insane amount of them in PEI, but Maine is on a whole other level. I've read about them but it's really insane how many of them there are. I guess you get used to them after a while, but man oh man...

After a day and night, the next day we were well on track to making landfall before sunset. The winds were still great, and we were heading pretty much on track. As is always the case, especially on long crossings, the last part of the trip is always very long as you feel like you are almost there, you can see land, see how far you've made it on the chart and how little is left, but you are still 5 hours out... And that time always seems to tick slower. But we made it in finally dodged about a million lobster pots, and found place to anchor on the north side of Isle Au Haut. Beautiful little anchorage, but we were mostly concerned with getting the hook down, checking in to the US, eating, and then sleeping (hard).

Anchoring was easy, checking in was painful, but then easy. The CPB Roam app the US government provides is cool, when it's working, which seems to be randomly? We had set it all up on my phone before we left, but I couldn't get in. Kept getting some kind of weird login error. Theone got it all setup on her phone, and then it crashed submitting the check in request, multiple times. We then tried setting it up on a tablet we have, and it failed to log in, but worked the second time, then crashed when I clicked to apply for verified travellers, but hadn't entered an email address for Aria, then couldn't log in again, then did login, and the submission finally worked. Several minutes later without a video call, we were all 100% approved, with a cruising license, and verified traveller status (so we can check back in more easily in the future). I think the issues weren't probably the app, but just the sites the app are connecting too. Probably could have done the request on my phone if we just kept retrying maybe? Either way, painful, but when it worked it finally worked and we were all approved in done.

And so here we are! Checked into the US. We have some plans to meet up with family, and then we'll continue making our way south.

Trip was 134 NM total, completed in 34 Hours.