Nova Scotia 1 - Shelburne ( 10,550 miles to date)

I enter Shelburne on Nova Scotia after 220 miles and 40 hours at sea after leaving Rockland, Maine - which involved passing through 13 miles of lobster pots. I tack a couple of times as I decide to continue "around the corner" and 25 mile up the coast to Shelburne. The Fog on the end of NS made me keep quite far off - 20 miles off in fact. I arrive in Shelburne in darkness and use the radar as I know there are fish farms about and they are unlit. I anchor in the loom of the lights of the town and am reasonably happy I am well away from other boats. <phew>

I awake to a beautiful morning, again, and head ashore to the Shelburne Yacht Club. They have a payphone on the wall and a toll free number for Canadian Customs - who give me a reference number that I must display prominently on Shadowmere - Easy-peasy.

There are no marinas in Nova Scotia - just yacht clubs that have pontoons and mooring buoys - and free anchorages. Lovely club, friendly, free coffee!! and very helpful. I walk the town

A nice quiet town -  ten by ten streets and avenues with a main street. Well spaced out houses, lots of trees.

love the trucks

And the "motel" rooms are cute mini cabins

Main street

Loyalists - home from home, I wish I had been here during the 12th week in July

Flegs on the road, more Belfast than Belfast...

I find a Museum called the Dory shop and fall in love with the Grand Banks Dory boats
I get chatting to a guy who teaches people to build these with beginners in a week. I feel a new project coming on when I get home. The Dories here use pine boards with bevels to allow a scarf joint, the bottom of all dories is flat - which makes construction much easier - if you remove the seats you can stack dories -  big ships used to take a load out to the grand banks, lower them over the side  -one or two men to a dory and let them loose to line fish in the fog. If you couldn't get back to the boat,you died (maybe).

And some details of their construction - suitably rustic that I might be able to master - if I have an electric plane and get my bandsaw working properly!

The frames are joined with metal joiners - less hassle than steaming or having to pick through timber to get bent ones. Oak is used here but I am told many woods will do as the "planks" have considerable strength

The bottom is pine planks with grooves, mastic and biscuits (thin lathes that fit in the grooves - I got a router and learnt to use it before the voyage - I made a new staircase and galley locker so the bottom is easy... Knots in the pine are removed and replaced with epoxy so the Dory shop is not averse to modern technology.

The fact that the slopey bits of the frames are straight also makes things easier. The complete design is easy to build - if you can use a plane - a new skill to learn!

This is how they were stacked on the mother ships.

Milford runs one week long courses, I am also told to visit Lunenberg further up the coast as they also make boats, sell plans, books and videos. An alternative method of manufacture is to use sheets of plywood bent around the places and a bottom plywood base - with similar frames to the ones above. The secret to this method is to add fibreglass tape, epoxy and filler to the joins and probably sheath the entire boat, inside and out, with fibreglass cloth and epoxy resin - and do a superb paint job.

I leave Shelburne and head for Halifax where Nick from Donaghadee is due to join the boat - no wind!

Halifax is big - maybe smaller than Belfast. It is up a channel and then is narrow where the town is, and then opens up to a large deep basin that can hold a 100 large ships at anchor - it was used during WWII to assemble convoys that set out across the Atlantic. I anchor off Shearwater yacht club before the town and do some maintenance  - but their washing machines are out of order and there is no supermarket. Also I am planning a land trip to Montreal to see Rachel who has immigrated there. I move past the two to Dartmouth Yacht Club where they have mooring bouys where I can leave Shadowmere safe. I get a train to Montreal  - a mere 18 hours away and fly back - the flight takes nearly two hours. Canada is big.

I found Dartmouth Yacht Club really helpful. I ask Dan the manager about buses to the train station and he runs me the 4 or 5 miles himself. Returning by plane meant I arrived at the club at midnight - and again Dan came to the rescue to get me through the security gates - I was able to dial up a number on the keypad, talk to him at home and he was able to open the gate remotely, Phew.

Belfast to Belfast 10,000 miles (+/-)

Belfast to Belfast, it has taken 10,000 miles (a bit more actually) But I am finally here.

This is not the city hall's best side.

Belfast Maine is a fairly small town, bigger than Donaghadee, smaller than Bangor (our Bangor - the "other" Bangor is actually just up the river from here, had there been a bus I might have visited.
Coming up the river was a bit like looking at Belfast Lough (the Cultra side), maybe, at a stretch

Well, ok, we don't have docks at every house (tidal range is about 7 feet if I recall correctly, so Docks are not too onerous to put in.

Lots of people get out on the water, though it is a bit lurky dismal grey today.

I radio the harbour master (Cathy) and she says they are a bit packed as New York Yacht club boats are arriving tonight and tomorrow. I say I am on a pilgrimage from Belfast, Northern Ireland and very keen to visit Belfast Maine, Oh, says Cathy, in that case you can have a buoy right in front of the town. Turn right at red buoy 6 and take the second buoy. The staff are just finishing so I have to find the buoy in the gloom and the glar. I think another boat is on it and pick up a private one, after calculating I will have six inches under my keel at low water. In the morning the people who I thought were on my mooring come over and point out the one I should have got last night. I move and am in safe for the next 3 days. I fly a real Union Jack as a house flag from the forestay so the tourists can wonder... (the red ensign is universally mis-understood - I have had people think it was a New Zealand flag)

It is Saturday morning and I see a rowing boat;

It is loosely like a scillies Gig I think - there is a number of boats about and when I get chatting to them, they say the designs are very loose - there are no regulations. One of the teams tried to take their boat to the Isles of Scilly but stopped when they realised they would have to get their boat measured. In the end they went and were lent a "proper" scillies gig. These boats are interesting as Shirley and I have rowed (as in used oars and not argued...)  in the Strangford "St Ayles skiff" with its four rowers and a coxain.  

If that was my boat, I would have the cox beat a drum...

There are a number of nice boats too;

The boat building competition is of great interest to me, the competitors have two hours to build a boat, which gets judged. Activity is frenetic

Time is nearly up! there have been a number of heats

These two guys are wrestling to get a panel to line up, I ask will it float and one guy replies, Will it hell, will it get finished is a better question. I think they are under a bit of time pressure.

The magic of plywood, and these days epoxy resin, and filler to make fillets, painting plywood all over with epoxy and even draping a layer of fibreglass over plywood with more epoxy and tape at the seams makes for a cheap boat - as long as you paint epoxy - it doesn't like sunshine.

All through America I have seen evidence of lots and lots of people and organisations sponsoring things. From bench seats to complete parks - lots of things in Annapolis Navy Academy for instance. Here we see Belfast City and the Belfast Co-op have helped with the festival. I visit the Coop, it has a good cafe and Wifi. Its goods are expensive though and it is the only place to buy food in the town. In fact the town is a mix of old buildings and tourist shops, not that upmarket, I think the town and area have had some economic downtown, when I visit the museum  I see that former industry has gone. 

The buildings are unpretentious.

As usual, lots of the older buildings are protected and preserved, and a walking tour around the tour with numbered plaques, of course I just sort of randomly wander about absorbing the ambience, rather than walking in the approved order. The town is basically a dozen streets anyway so, not big.

There are lots of tourists including french speakers from Canada. Hence the dual nationality signs.

A better view of the city hall

A wee museum - in the process of moving but some interesting things anyway. I had read in the pilot on the way up that, according to them, Belfast means place of many anchorages, I engage with the lady running the museum to tell her that I was told as a school child that the name Belfast came from Bel Farset - the mouth of the Farset river - or something like that in Gaelic. (I hope I am right - she wrote it down - I told her Google was her friend and she said, not her friend, she prefered books and word of mouth).

I checked later - the Gaelic is Beal Feirste - and Feirste is gaelic for sandbar, but at a later date it was true that the Lagan and Farset rivers joined at Belfast. Therein lies the truth or the fake news - who knows?

My phone has no 4G ( or lower) reception here - unusual as so far the states has had remarkably good reception the whole way up the coast. And no T-mobile shop here either, which is a disaster as I had hoped to open the phone up to be able to use it in Canada - would have cost me 5 dollars for a month  - I can't do it online as the credit card form requires a US zip code <sigh> I phone a human on their helpline, after some time when I could hear her clicking in the background, she tells me, sorry she can't help me as her computer needed a US zipcode. Not impressed with their human helpline. (the T-mobile account is actually run my MetroPCS which has had shops in every town to date. I should have sorted it out ion Boston.

Anyway, the museum;

I go to the old cinema ( the Colonial pictured above) that evening to see Mission Impossible, if you ask me it was impossible. 

How the land was divied up originally, I suppose incoming settlers were glad of it.

Back in the harbour I get to exmine the gigs and chat to some of the crew, they tell me there is community rowing at 7:30 on Sunday morning - I could turn up and get a row! In the end the numbers don't quite suit and whilst they have one "passenger seat" it is in the bow and it would be unfair to the rowers to put someone of my weight in the bow - it makes rowing much harder if a boat is bow heavy.

They have a really good brokeback trailer.

Their thole pins rarely break - they use oak.

Or high tech - there are no rules apart from length and number of crew.

Along the waterfront is a boatyard with the biggest boatlift I have ever seen.

440 Ton(ne?)s Dig those tires!

There is a bridge of low fixed height in the river, but a good walk up the riverbanks

I am particulary inpressed that Penobscot McCrum gave them the land for the trail. I must research this McCrum fellow - maybe I am a rich landowner in Maine! The larger bay on the way up here holds the Penobscot river.

and I find a chair! but don't like the design much, although I would like all lobster pots lifted off the seabed and brought ashore to be used to make other things.

As I leave I spot an evocative boat name - "Racundra"  the boat design looks accurate too - the real Arthur Ransome (who wrote Swallows and Amazons) sailed a small boat around the Baltic with his lover, who I think was Trotsky's secretary. Arthur Ransome was also friendly with a few leading lights in the Marxist world and did some work for MI5, as well as writing sailing books that probably got me here.. 

And then onwards to Nova Scotia, I stop for the night 25 miles from here near Rockland, I manage to get phone reception to report my leaving the US and head off at 7am. 40 Hours later I arrive in Shelburne with only lobster pots, fog and tiredness to cope with.