Our next stop, Shelburne was over 80 miles from Lunenburg, so we planned an overnight stop in Herring Cove. Lobster pots are a real nightmare in these waters and even at over 100 meters depth you regularly come across buoys marking the pots, quite often with lines 20 or more metres long trailing on the surface. You can’t relax at all, you have to keep constant watch, changing course all the time to give the buoys a wide berth. Fog and rain make this even more difficult which were the conditions as we approached Herring Cove. We moored up on a pontoon in the pouring rain behind an American flagged vessel, which was on its way north to cruise the Labrador Coast. The cruising guide said there would be over 2 meters water at low tide, but a slight check in speed as we were making our final manoeuvres and 0 meters on the depth sounder revealed this not the case. The bottom was soft mud, but the next tide that would be even lower, so despite the rain we moved to the other side of the pontoon into deeper water. The wind was howling and the rain lashing down, so we made the first use of our splendid new enclosure and sat out the evening in the cockpit, in the warm, gazing out at our grey, uninviting surroundings. We did not go ashore.

The next morning dawned brighter and we made our way the 56 miles into Shelburne, doing the now accustomed dance around the lobster pots. Shelburne is another charming old town, founded in 1783 by New York Loyalists retreating from the American revolution and many of the wooden buildings date from that period.