Monday, July 15th.

We are now sailing into tidal areas, so Ron got to play with his new tidal atlas.  No foul tides on this leg, but the Richelieu rapids have currents of up to 7 knots.  Our planned departure time happened to avoid these, so we were quite happy.  We set off about 9:30, and sailed for about 30 minutes before the little wind we had disappeared.  Motoring for the next 3 hours was not much fun.  It was still hot, hot, hot and the props kept getting clogged with weeds, so we had to de-weed them every half hour or so.  (The ships log was also catching weed, so our log reading today was a little low.)   Just after midday, the winds returned and we sailed until 3pm.  Our speed through the water was pretty slow – 1-3 knots, but with the current we were making 4-6 knots over the ground.  We finished the day with a very nice 10 knot breeze which gave us 5-6 knots through the water and 10+ knots over the ground.  Why couldn’t we have had this all day?

We docked at Portneuf, 46 40.96N 071 52.69W, and went for a bike ride around the town.  It’s small but very nice and some of the houses have beautiful views over the river.  The tidal range here today was 10 feet and we definitely had evidence that we were in a tidal area when we tried to push our bikes up the ramp from the docks at low water. 

We were wondering about the name of this town – Port 9, until someone mentioned that neuf also means “new”, so it turns out we’re in Newport!

Ship’s Log: 2768.7nm, Today's log: 17.2nm, Season total: 314.8nm.