Portland, Maine to Halifax, Nova Scotia - Day 1

Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Thu 26 Jul 2012 21:13
Nova Scotia has long been on our 'hit-list' of places to go and this seemed the perfect opportunity as Portland - Nova Scotia is possibly the shortest crossing distance.  The total distance to Halifax, which is on the far coast of Nova Scotia is 360 miles so it would be a two night, 3 day sail.
The first day passed fairly uneventfully, we managed to leave at 8am, 2 hours later than our intended departure time as we had a minor engine issue.  John had gone into the engine room to do the usual pre-sail checks and had found that one of the clamps holding the engine air filter hose onto the engine block had snapped.  After a pretty thorough search of our spares cupboard, it became clear we had nothing suitable so had no choice but to wait until the boatyard at the marina we were staying in opened to see if they had one.  The good news was, we had got up at 5am to sail at 6am, but the boatyard didn't open until 8am, so we got an extra hour and a half in bed - John did jokingly, (I think), suggest that 'someone' might have delibeately sabotaged the clip to get the extra sleep, moi - surely not??
Anyway, by 8am we were underway.  Once out of Portland harbour, we set the sails and settled into the watch routine.  We were sailing nicely and all was very quiet. By about lunchtime, the wind had changed direction, and dropped quite a bit - we were expecting this, and we had to put the engine on for a while.  
One thing we did see a lot of was flies!!  They were everywhere, John spent nearly the whole of his watch period zapping them with his electric tennis racket fly killer.  This is a very effective method of killing flies, but unfortunately it does leave behind a distinct smell of burning fly which, with the amount he was killing, was almost unpleasantly strong!  The rest of the day and night passed fairly uneventfully, until about 10am the next day when John spotted something out to sea.  It looked very peculiar and so we decided to take a closer look and what we saw was this....

 The seagull is clearly standing on something...

 ... and when it flew off, we realised it was a wooden door!

In addition to looking for oddities in the water, we keep a careful look out for wildlife.  This is big whale country. All we saw that we could definitely identify today however was a small pod of dolphins, quite a way off.  We did however see what we think were whales, as they were a different shape in the water, and much bigger - unfortunately we didn't get close enough to see what species they were.
Lastly, as we have come further East it is a LOT colder!!  We have been well wrapped up on the whole trip with thermals etc, and are hoping that this is not indicative of Canadian weather, continued sunshine would be great!