On Our Way to the Northwest Passage

Billy Black, taking photos and video, escorted us out past Castle Hill.

I’ve been looking forward to writing this first sentence for 18 months… “0800, slight swells from the south, winds light and variable and on our way to the Northwest Passage.”  Damn. We’re currently 22 hours out of Newport, exited the Cape Cod Canal around 5:00 yesterday evening and Bagan has been performing flawlessly.  The land based pressures and anxieties have been slowly dissipating and while none of us know what lays ahead, the excitement of the project is starting to build again. 

We dropped our dock lines at 10:20 yesterday morning and, taking photographs and video, Billy Black escorted us out past Castle Hill.  (Apart from being a brilliant marine photographer, Billy and his wife Joyce, are two of the best people going; very, very proud to call them friends). The gravity of Billy’s departure wasn’t wasted on any of us. Watching his boat turn and head back to Newport was about as poignant as it gets (little did we know that we’d see him 20 minutes later as he raced out to get shots of  transatlantic competitors ending their race from England to Newport, but it was poignant nonetheless). 

I write this last sentence with fingers crossed; today is going to be a day for doing absolutely nothing but sitting back and enjoying the passing scenery; miles and miles of open, blue and empty Atlantic ocean.  Halifax tomorrow. (Actually… truth be told there is one more point of anxiety; this blog entry will be the first one we upload via satellite. Because the computer crashed a day before departure I’ve never had a chance to test the connection. So, if you’re reading this now… )