Sunday, July 21st.

The forecast was for NW 10 – 15 knots – a perfect beam reach today.  The winds gave us some trouble getting off the dock since they were pushing the boat right onto it.  We got out of the harbor, hosted sails and they died away.  So another day of motoring to Isle aux Coudres, 47 25.12N 070 24.55W.  We had planned to anchor here, but saw some moorings and picked one up instead.  The tides were running very strongly at the time and Teresa made an excellent job of positioning the boat for Ron to pick it up.  Having moored, it was pretty weird – the ships log showed we were travelling at 3.5 knots.  Of course this was the water rushing past the boat which was stationary, however it really felt like the boat was moving pretty well through the water and looking behind, we were leaving a wake!  On the way we passed two ski areas – Mont St. Anne and le Massif so we have some new ideas for the winter. 

We’re now in slightly salty water from the Atlantic and its way colder than the St. Lawrence waters we’ve been swimming in.  The air temperature was also significantly colder today at 62F – a far cry from the upper 90s we were seeing a few days ago.  Perhaps this is due to the colder water we’re now in, in which case we may be in for a much cooler rest of the summer.  We’ll let you know!

At around 5pm, the tide changed, but the wind didn’t!  So we found ourselves being pushed onto the mooring buoy by the wind against a weak tide.  This resulted in our mooring lines getting wrapped around the buoy, which took 15 minutes to fix.  Ron pointed out that the next tide change, (at around midnight), wouldn’t cause the same problem, ‘cause the wind would no longer be against the tide.  Teresa wasn’t convinced however, so we set the alarm for midnight to check the mooring.  At 11:30pm we were woken by the mooring buoy banging against the hull.  Sure enough the tide had changed as had the wind direction, so we were still wind against tide!!  We sorted out the wrapped lines, then had to run the engines in astern to prevent the same thing happening again.  We stood ½ hour watches – and Teresa took the first watch.  By about 1pm, it was time for Ron’s watch, and he declared that the tide was strong enough to overcome the wind and went back to bed, having set the alarm for 5:30am to check the next tide change.   With hindsight, it would have been easier if we had anchored!

Ship’s Log: 2851.2nm, Today's log: 30.2nm, Season total: 397.3nm.