Arrived Halifax 14:39 local 6/18…

Four hours outside of Halifax and the weather holds; long, fat swells from the SSE, winds light & variable and not a cloud in the sky. Yesterday, as we made our way past the Bay of Fundy, we felt the influence of its legendary tides. We were approximately 80 miles to the south of the bay and found that the set was so strong it knocked us about five degrees off course. This leg to Halifax was basically a shake-down leg to, as Gerry Driscol used to say on “Intrepid”, “See what we can break.”

Nothing truly broke but we did have two problems. The first being the computer… again. It’s a Dell tower, a few years old and just doesn’t seem to be up to the task of running several high demand programs simultaneously. We have the electronic Nobeltec charts, an Airmar program which via an outside sensor gives us not only wind speed and direction but temp, a barometer, wind chill, apparent wind and satellite availability (Airmar is one of the more amazing marine innovations of the last five years). We’re also running two engine room cameras off of the computer as well as the three internet (land based, wireless card and satellite) access programs. Last night the computer showed us the Blue Screen of Death twice and had to be shut down and rebooted. After the total temper tantrum it threw the day before departure and last’s night TT, we’ve lost all confidence in it. Ted Croy is aboard and has been building computers since he was 12. Alas, the spending isn’t quite over as when we get in Ted is going computer shopping. Personally I’d like to give this Dell the float test but have been talked into keeping it as a backup for the Nobeltec program only.

The other small problem occurred at 5:00 this morning and was operator error. In the three years I’ve owned Bagan I never quite realized that the fuel pickup lines are a few inches off the bottom of the tanks, which only makes sense. These pickup lines think that the tank is empty when there’s actually about 15 gallons showing in the sight gauge. You can guess the outcome. Our immediate fear was that we picked up something in the prop (water temps were 45 degrees at this point and going over the side a real possibility) but quickly realized how we’d miscalculated and simply sucked the tank dry. We’ve three other fuel tanks aboard and 20 minutes later we were underway having been soberly being reminded that complacency is always lurking.