Around Cape Sable

       It’s been fog, fog, and more fog.  The fog enclosed us as we left Bush Island and stayed.  We saw very little until it was literally a few feet away, whether it was a bird or a buoy, and we never saw the few boats that were on the radar or listed on the chart through their AIS frequency.  (I tell you though, after a few hours of staring at fog, you start to make out all kinds of things…)  As we approached Little Port L’Hebert (pronounced “la bear”) we both leaned forward in our seats to try to see the shoreline.  Little Port L’Hebert is actually a small cove big enough for one or two vessels.  We were already inside it according to the chart plotter.  Dan looked at me and shrugged and told me to go ahead and get the anchor ready.  We could waves breaking and the sound of the anchor dropping.  It was surreal experience.  Right before sunset the fog thinned enough for us to the see the rocky beaches horse-shoeing around us, but then it dropped back down on us again and stayed.  We picked our way out of there in the morning and headed West.  

We had a considered a short hop over to McNutt’s Island, which is in the mouth of the river leading to Shelburne, but the tide was with us and we thought we’d push on to be that much closer to Cape Sable, which we planned to come around on Friday.  So we continued in the fog, listening to the occasional fog horn or whistle buoy, and then suddenly we had visibility.

        Not only did we have visibility, we had two fin back whales blowing and rolling.  And then one of them breached.  We were like two little kids, our mouths hanging open, staring at each other.  Did that really just happen??  And while Dan had the presence of mind to fumble with his phone to get a picture, one of the whales breached again.  He turned on the video and recorded a splash of water and both of us cheering.  (I won’t bother to share that here.)  We watched them surface and dive several times, cameras at the ready, but they were done breaching and the pictures just look like dark humps in the water.  

Sunset at Port LaTour

        Fog came down again in patches as we cruised to our destination anchorage at Port LaTour, and then lifted again to give us a spectacular sunset and a beautiful full moon rising. 

Moon over Port LaTour

Friday … fog again.  We left early to catch the right tide around Cape Sable.  The sun was out, making it a brighter fog, and set up fog-bows all around.  Cameras don’t really capture the colors well, but it was incredibly beautiful.  The sea was almost glassy and the winds negligible as we made our way south and west around Cape Sable.  This area gets a lot of traffic from transient yachts who cross to and from Maine or Massachusetts.  We plucked several water bottles and other plastic trash out of the sea, including an entire bag of trash.  I’m choosing to believe it accidentally fell overboard from someone’s yacht, and not that it was deliberately tossed into the sea.  We will dispose of it properly.

Bright Fog

The fog finally lifted as we made our way to Woods Harbour.  We bypassed the man-made enclosure and anchored in the Sound between the Harbour and Squirrel Island.  We can see the land here, though the fog is hovering offshore, waiting for us tomorrow.                         

Fogbow