Nathan Wanted Wind: 7/14/26

Today started out with what continues to be my biggest area of concern on this trip: docking. We needed to fill our water tanks, so we needed to dock up somewhere, but there was quite a lot of deliberation on my part as to where and when, so as to ensure things were as easy as possible. After having spent the better part of the morning worrying about it, we managed to dock up pretty smoothly in about 30 seconds and got to filling water. After we filled with water, Helene took a quick hose shower while Nathan and Kaia took out the trash and I planned our trip out of Halifax. Nathan has become our go-to weather reporter for the trip, but so far, his predictions on how much wind there was going to be had been disappointingly optimistic. Today, he promised us once again that we'd have good wind—the difference today being that instead of being overly optimistic, today he ended up being conservative. Thanks to Nathan's weather proclamations, we started out with three reefs in the main, which turned out to be very nice to have as the wind built up to 25–30 knots. Even with the reefs, we found ourselves doing 9.5 knots down the face of most of the waves, which had built to around 10 feet tall by 5 o'clock. If I had needed any more proof that being a "captain" makes you a bit of a buzzkill, this was it, because as everyone was hooping and hollering as we rode the waves, I was worrying about the rigging and how much the humming the hull makes over 9 knots affects weld strength. That being said, we all did have some fun trying to see how much smoother we could make the ride compared to the autopilot in the big waves. As the sun started to set and the waves continued to grow in size, the hooting and hollering did die down a bit as everyone sobered up to the fact that we're in for likely a long, uncomfortable night of 3-hour on-and-off watches.

Pelagic in downtown Halifax

Helene mid "shower"

Me on the bow in the early day when we were all still super excited for the wind

Nathan and Helene Bringing out the Jib after a jibe

Nathan Having a shot at the wheel in the big waves

Helene adopting a look of focus for her turn at the wheel

Kaia's first time ever steering a boat in waves having some fun with it after getting used to it