CRUISE NOTES
Peter Loverridge’s Cruising Guide to Nova Scotia covers the whole coast, up through Cape Breton Island. His website is cruisingguidetons.blogspot.com from which you can order his book on a thumb drive. The original version is long out of print. He maintains a blog with updates.
Mike Cox’s Cruising the Eastern Shore covers Halifax east to Canso in significantly greater detail, and Cheryl Barr’s Cruising
Guide to the Canadian Maritimes covers Cape Breton Island best. There are a few copies of Mike’s book on the used book sites and Landfall appears to have some copies of Cheryl’s book.
Cruising Cape Breton The Pilot Press website has online user updates for their guides to Nova Scotia, Newfoundland & Labrador.
Our experience with fog on both trips was largely limited to Cape Sable upon first crossing over, corroborating the conventional wisdom that later August through early October gives the clearest weather. We had some cool evenings, but never fired up the cabin heater.
We carried two diesel jugs lashed on deck, as dockside fueling is rare and you often need a way to transport fuel from service stations. The only time we managed to fill up at dockside was in Baddeck, on Bras d’Or Lake. Dockside fuel is also available in Halifax and Shelburne. The LeHave Yacht Club had emptied its tanks for the season during our early September return, to be refilled in the spring.
Instead of the rigid water jugs we lashed on deck in 2009, this time we carried a couple of collapsible 5 gal Smart Bottles. These heavyduty jugs fold flat for easy storage and do the job when there’s no freshwater on the wharf. Many wharves have standard 115-volt outlets and freshwater faucets that take a garden hose, so it’s a good idea to carry one of these, along with a 115-volt/15 amp adapter for your shorepower cord in case you want to charge your batteries.
When we returned to Maine, we cleared in by cellphone thanks to the Small Vessel Reporting System, which is in the process of being replaced by a much simpler app, going by the acronym ROAM (Reporting Offshore ArrivalMobile). You must pre-register through the app and, on your return, report through the app and have a vieo chat with an agent.