Caution

Yesterday was a bluebird day, clear and sunny from start to finish.  According to Environment Canada, the winds were supposed to build from light and variable in the morning to 10-20 in the early afternoon.

We contemplated how far we'd go.  Round Cap Caution: 72 miles, possibly rough.  If not that, then what? I programmed three options into the plotter: long, longer and longest: 47 miles, 67 miles and 72 miles. They're all too long. I would do 72 miles to spare us something worse. We would choose along the way according to conditions.

Forty-seven miles came and went quickly.  With a super early start, we were there by noon and kept going.  The conditions were easy and the day was gorgeous.

I downloaded weather files created with a NOAA model.  It predicted lighter winds than the Canadian forecast.

By the time we reached our middle option, we were on a roll.  We kept going.

The Canadian forecast was more likely to be accurate than weather files generated with the NOAA model; The Canadian forecasts are more specific and contain local knowledge. Although I wouldn't have counted on NOAA model accuracy, the NOAA files did give me confidence that the Canadian forecast probably wouldn’t be wrong by not predicting much stronger winds.

The question in my mind was: will this be too rough?

At 2 PM, our radio came to life: “Quijote, Quijote, Quijote, this is Harmony, over.”  Harmony turned out to be another sailboat planning to round the Cape.  They were fishing for information that would help them make a decision.  I told them we had just discussed it and decided to make a go for it.  I didn’t have any information for her, so I’m sure I wasn’t much help.  In the end, Quijote went around, and Harmony waited for a better day.   Different boats, different circumstances, different captains result in different decisions.  

The seas got bigger, Quijote did her thing, dancing through the waves.  The passage seemed endless.  Diving, pitching, rolling, twisting, pounding, rolling… items thrown below decks crashed.  The conditions slowed our speed down to 3 knots.  It would take us hours to get to sheltered water at that rate.  And hours it was, but eventually we plodded into Fitzhugh Sound and out of the chop and ocean swell.

Then, before losing our wind, we pulled out our sails and practiced unfurling, tacking and jibing.  It was good fun on a sunny, breezy day.  We’d been motoring into the wind all day.  We needed some fun.