Sunday, August 10th – Iles de la Madelaine.

We had been promised Northerly winds of 20-25 knots for several days now, which would give us a perfect beam reach to the Iles de la Madeleine.  (Actually 15-20 knots would have been really perfect.)  In days of yore, (before GPS), you would try to time an overnight passage so that you made landfall just before dawn, when you could unambiguously identify buoys and get an accurate position fix, but enter harbor just after dawn in daylight.  We tried to do the same, not so much for the buoy identification, but we wanted to arrive in daylight.  The trouble is, a sailboat’s speed is difficult to predict.  So we left at noon, thinking that if we went fast we would arrive at dawn, and if we went slowly, we would arrive by 5pm. 

We set off at noon and had light winds again, so motored for the first 2 hours.  Then the winds came, (fast) and we hoisted the main with one reef and pretty soon had 2 reefs in the main and a lot of genny rolled away.  We were making up to 8.5 knots, in pretty big beam seas.  When standing in the cockpit, our feet are about 18” above the water.  I’m 5’ 8” and at times was looking up at the waves, which puts them at up to 9’!  Occasionally part of a wave would find its way into the back of the cockpit, or over the boat, but we were dry under the hardtop.  The boat was crashing through them quite frequently though, making it difficult to sleep.  After we got through the shipping lanes, we rolled the genoa away entirely to slow the boat, since we were sailing too fast and would have arrived 2 hours early (in darkness)! 

We were also lucky to have a beautiful sunset and, during the night,  a pretty full moon infrequently hidden by clouds, but for the most part, visible. 

As it turned out we arrived just before dawn and entered the harbor of la Pointe de la Grande-Entrée, 47 33.38N 61 33.53W, as day was dawning.  Neither of us had had much sleep, so we tied up, and went to bed for a few hours, happy with Quinita’s first overnight passage. 

Ships Log: 4351.4, Todays Log: 106.0, Seasons Total: 763.4