 I departed Dartmouth Yacht Club’s mooring field at 7:30am and headed for Chester, NS in Mahone Bay. My friend Wilson Fitt had arranged for me to use a mooring ball in Chester Harbour and within easy walking distance of his house. I had a great trip to Chester. The first few hours involved some more tough pounding through the waves but then things calmed down and the rest of the trip was pretty easy. |
 I arrived in Chester around 5:00pm. Wilson met me at the dock and I went up to his place for a shower and a cold beer. After that I had dinner with Wilson and his wife Thelma, Wilson’s mother Christine and a few of Wilson & Thelma’s friends. It was a great evening with a wonderful dinner and company. |
 I met Wilson about 10 years ago (where did the time go?) when I was working for Wheelabrator EOS and pursuing DBO contracts for water treatment projects in Dartmouth, NS and in Moncton, NB. Wheelabrator had teamed up with The Hardman Group, a local development and real estate management company and Wilson was my key contact with our local partner. |
 Wilson is also an avid sailor. He built his own sailboat from scratch and sailed it all over Atlantic Canada and through much of the Caribbean. Last summer Wilson sailed it single handed to Scotland. Wilson has also managed to incorporate sailing in to his work career—recently starting an assignment as a project manager for the rebuild of the famous sailing schooner “The Bluenose”. |
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Thursday, August 26
 The weather report for today was not good—high winds, waves and fog, so I decided to stay put for another day. I took advantage of the time to change the engine oil and to perform several other small maintenance tasks. This also gave me an opportunity to put the dingy back on its davits and to try out the new fittings that I had installed on the pontoon to help keep it in place while underway. |
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Wednesday, August 25
| I returned the rental car and got a ride to the dingy repair place. It is on the waterfront and “just around the corner” from the Dartmouth Yacht Club. I picked up the dingy and Jason, the repair technician helped me put it in the water at their dock. I then motored back to the marina. As a visiting member of the Goderich Yacht Club, the Dartmouth Yacht Club was generous enough to offer me two free days on one of the mooring balls in their mooring field. I happily accepted their offer and moved Ananda from the dock to the mooring field at noon. I spent the rest of the day setting up the new computer and organizing my provisions. | |||
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Tuesday, August 24
More running around in the rental car today. I also went to Tom’s place of business (Maritime Lawn and Garden Supply) and he helped me do some work on fittings that I had bought to strengthen the railings on Ananda’s stern. With that job complete I did some more running around and also made a trip to the grocery store to pick up additional provisions in anticipation of Emily and her best friend Alice joining me for the trip from Halifax to St. Andrews. There is a large boating supply and service business less within sight of the marina . I went there to talk to them about some repairs to the dingy and arranged for the work to be done. I went back to the marina, loaded the (deflated) dingy into the rental car, took it to the service depot and arranged to pick it up the next day.
Monday, August 23
Tom brought me back to Dartmouth and dropped me off at the boat. I contacted a car rental company and arranged for them to pick me up at the marina. Now that I had transportation I headed for a nearby computer repair place to see if they could do anything with the wine-drinking computer. The technician there figured that the motherboard was fried but he did manage to extract the hard drive intact and install it in a portable casing so I could use it like a portable hard drive. Next I was off to find a Best Buy store to shop for a new computer. Luckily, I found a store that had Compaq and hp laptop computers on sale so I managed to get a new laptop that was very similar to my damaged one—and allowed me to use the same 12volt power supply.
I went back to Tom’s place for dinner and for more visiting with the family. Tom has sailed in the area a lot so we reviewed all the possible choices for ports of call and anchorages. We also started to track the progress of Hurricane Daniel, which was beginning to show some signs of activity in the Caribbean and was a possible threat to the American Atlantic and maybe even parts of Nova Scotia. Tom is an experienced sailor & he has sailed throughout the Maritimes and also in several Halifax to Boston and Halifax to Bermuda races.