Monday 21 August

To rather a lot of rain, we left the Marina at St Peters, southern end of the Bras d'Or Lakes, and went round the corner to the Canal and Lock. As we entered the lock and threw a line to the lockkeeper, the current swung Fortune round and we ended up back to front, having to exit the lock backwards, J steering in a rather nonchalant manner.

Back at sea again, and the fog was fairly thick, but not so bad I couldn't make out the marks leading us round the mess of islands, past the Bay of Rocks (oh, yes it was) and out into Chedabucto (?sp) Bay. This is an enormous bay, and with the murky weather, the distant coast of Nova Scotia kept disappearing. It's one of those times when you think you'll never get there. I was on the helm for five hours, on my monkey perch - which sounds a long time, but with the rocky sea, it gave me something to do and something to hold on to.

But at last, we started spotting offshore islets, and J was plotting our course to take us up to Canso. Now, this is the useful bit about being helmswoman - none of that tedious passage planning, just steer such-and-such compass course, and have all the fun of seal watching on our approach. Their heads stuck out of the water, twisting to watch us as we chugged on by. We didn't have a large scale chart for Canso, and the buoyage was confusing, to say the least, apparently directing us into a very narrow and shallow cut between one seal island and another. So we decided to take a chance on using a wider piece of water called False Passage, with a spectacularly chunky lump of unlit rock right in the middle. Hmmm. One eye on the echo sounder, the other on the water - the advantage of the wandering squint, eh? And J chooses an anchorage just off the town.