Just after I went down for my first 'off watch period' the fog dropped.  I came back up to add an extra pair of eyes and for the next hour or so the visibility was limited to about 50-100 metres.  One thing we noticed during the fog were the 'fog drops'.  The moisture out of the fog comes down in huge rain-like spots, you can almost count them. The other weird thing was that the fog cleared from the top down - I have always thought of fog as 'lifting' when it cleared, but this time we had clear blue sky above us, but still 50 metres visibility around us - weird!

 "Fog Drops" on the bimini

 

Once the fog had cleared, we set off in earnest, we had turned the corner at the southern tip of Nova Scotia, and the wind was at a perfect angle for a nice, easy, and slightly too fast sail back to Maine, using the mainsail and the large genoa headsail.  By early morning we were down to the gib, (the smaller headsail), and the mainsail, both heavily reefed to keep the speed down so we could arrive in daylight.

The best thing about the sail was that we saw a real whale, with a real tail!  I had been quite disappointed that we couldn't get to Digby, on the Bay of Fundy coast, as this is where they have the really big whales.  The ones we have been seeing were smaller minke whales with smaller tails.  John spotted this one and it made my day! Unfortunately, we were too busy watching and weren't able to get to the camera this time, next time....

We also had a passenger for about half of the trip, an obviously exhausted cormorant, who sat on the  back of the dinghy.  Once he was settled on the dinghy that was fine, but prior to this he had tried and failed to sit on both the sail, whilst it was out, clearly not a good idea, and the top of the bimini, but John had chased him off there as he was far too heavy!

 The cormorant 

 

 

 Going west, we sailed into a spectacular sunset

We arrived in Maine, again in fog, we are getting more used to this now as you can imagine, and are planning to spend the next 4/5 days in Bar Harbour, which is near the Acadia National Park, the most visited and reportedly the most spectacular national park in the USA.  I hope that it lives up to expectations as all I can see right now is more trees!!!

 First view of Maine, mountains, trees and of course, fog!!

Prior to arriving back in the USA, we had to notify customs of our intended arrival time.  The man I spoke to was unhappy that he was not speaking to the captain, John was busy avoiding fishing boats in thick fog, and after having asked me questions over and over that he already knew the answer to he announced that we would be boarded and our boat inspected on arrival. Needless to say this caused a few headaches.  One thing the Customs guys are really strict about are marine toilets.  A lot of the American harbours are designated no discharge zones, and you should keep the toilet holding tanks closed and locked and have them pumped out, rather than discharging them into the sea. So the first thing was to fasten the opening levers in the shut position with some cable ties - they weren't at all convincing! They are more strict about this than drug smuggling it seems!!  Also we had to fly our 'Q' quarantine flag, most countries now say not to, so I had to turn the whole boat upside down to find that, and then we had to deal with the fruit and vegetables.  We knew the rules about this so had used just about everything in Canada, so all that went overboard was a couple of potatoes, 2 ears of corn and an onion - not a big deal.  When the customs man arrived from the Department of Homeland Security at Bangor Airport, he was amazed that we hadn't been checked out before and that we had not actually seen any officials face-to-face since we arrived in New York - that said, he couldn't have been nicer.  We had been a bit concerned that when we arrived in Culebra, we were given a 6 month B2 visa stamp in our passports which had run out and we didn't want this to cause us any problems when we flew home in September.  So John went ashore with the guy and he got the stamp kit out from under the seat in his car and stamped the passports there and then. The whole system seems a bit disorganised to say the least, every time you call The Dept of Homeland Security, you get different information depending on who you talk to - it's like all the government departments at home, the right hand never seems to know what the left is doing, it's nice to know it doesn't just happen in the UK!