Passage to St. Pierre
August/Sept 2025
It would take us 128 hours (5.3 days) to travel the 620 km (715 statute miles) from Rockport, ME to St. Pierre, France. We left Rockport around three in the afternoon on Thursday, August 28th and arrived in St. Pierre at 11 PM, Tuesday, September 2, clocking an average speed of 4.8 kts (5.6 mph) … not a great speed for a 10 K runner, but a respectable average for Lillian.
Passage from Rockport to St. Pierre (August 28 to Sept 2, 2025)
The afternoon and evening of our departure we negotiated the Fox Island Thoroughfare and the full length of the archipelago of small islands and rocks in Merchants Row, under sail. The sky was clear, the sliver of a crescent moon was setting to the west, and the glaring light of a receding cruise ship was leading the way through the passage. With the help of the clear sky, moonlight, the guiding light of the cruise ship, and the track on the chart-plotter, the passage was quite peaceful and at 9 PM I turned the boat over to Hill under fair winds with a full mainsail and genoa with nothing but one well-marked outcropping of rock between Lillian and the next waypoint off the SE corner of Nova Scotia. In turning over the helm, I’d overlooked my cardinal rule to reduce sail before going into the night, regardless of how nice the predicted weather.
Sometime after three in the morning I awoke to feel Lillian powering through the waves, with her port rail in the water. Given that my bunk was on the high side of the boat, my lee cloth was failing me. The lee cloth is a piece of heavy fabric attached to the side of the bunk and a hand rail overhead. It’s purpose is to keep me reasonably in place, but the lines weren’t tight. At that boat angle, I had slid down and was wedged between the cloth and the cushions. Under rough conditions, the lee cloth works best by adding a clothing bag, blankets, extra pillows or other soft filling so that they are the ones wedged in the crease, with me on top. Annoyed, I made a mental note to be better prepared for the next night and fell back asleep.
Shortly before 6 AM my alarm woke me up to “Can’t find my way home,” by Steve Windwood and I put on my gear and went topside to relieve Brimmer. The winds had built in strength throughout the night and were now gusting to over twenty knots. I was not surprised to confirm that the boat was over-powered given the sail configuration I’d passed on to Hill the evening before. Thanks to the designer Bob Perry, Lillian can handle that much wind, even with all her sails flying, but there’s no point in it. It stresses the boat, not to mention the crew. And the boat will sail nearly as fast and much smoother with less sail. The problem is, once the winds have increased, it becomes difficult to reduce sail, especially for one person in the dark.
Now, with two of us on deck, I asked Brimmer to help to reef the mainsail. The preferred configuration would have been to roll up the large Genoa on the forestay and unfurl the smaller staysail aft of it. But, with twenty knots of wind, that would require a significant amount of force to pull in the Genny and, as much as I trusted the quality of the reefing hardware, I preferred not to put that level of stress on it. The simpler operation, given the wind, was to reef the mainsail … a well-practiced operation as follows:
Brimmer starts the engine while I connect my lifejacket to the starboard jack line that run from the cockpit to the bow of the boat to provide a lifeline. Feeling my way forward, I pull myself into the secure spot between the mast and the “granny bars,” a semi-circle of railing providing support I can lean back against. As Brimmer turns Lillian into the wind, the main sail starts to luff (flapping at the leading edge), relieving it of pressure. I then un-cleat the main halyard and release the clutch, setting the halyard free, allowing the sail to start sliding down the mast. At the same time, I start winching in a reefing line that runs through to the end of the boom then up to a grommet along the trailing edge of the sail (the leech). The objective is to reduce the size of the main sail from a big triangle to a smaller triangle. The halyard lowers the head of the sail to become the top of the new triangle. At the leading edge of the sail (the luff) there is a grommet about six feet up that is brought down and looped over a hook to become the new triangle’s lower front corner (the tack). And another grommet, approximately six feet up along the back edge of the sail, is pulled down and out towards the end of the boom to become the third corner of the new sail configuration.
The operation was going as expected until the reefing line suddenly went slack. I yelled back to the cockpit for Brimmer to shine his flashlight on the sail, immediately revealing that the reefing line had come untied and the trailing edge of the sail was flapping untethered. Fortunately, I had stopped winching in the reefing line before it got pulled through the boom. (This has happened in the past and it is very time consuming and tedious to rethread the line.) Given we were now missing a reefing line, we went back to plan “B,” or you might even call it plan “A,” which was as follows:
The main sail got winched back up to its full height and secured. We then ran the roller-reefing line for the Genny from its small winch over to a larger more powerful winch. After that, it was a very noisy, brute-force procedure of letting out the Genny a bit to relieve some pressure and then winching in the flapping result, wondering if anyone below could be sleeping through all the racket. After several minutes of working the lines, the Genny was reduced to a third of its original size and Lillian was riding much smoother through the waves. The entire reefing attempt had taken over ½ hour and Brimmer when below to catch some well-deserved sleep. Lillian subsequently moved briskly through the water under a full main and 1/3 Genoa for the next six hours, through my watch and Hill’s.
By noon that same day, Friday Aug 29th, the winds had shifted and dropped to under 10 knots. Burke was on watch and started the engine to maintain our progress. We then motor-sailed for the next 24 hours motivated by the objective to make sure to arrive in St. Pierre with enough time for Denise to get her French pastries before she had to jump ship on the 5th.
By the afternoon of the next day, Saturday Aug 30th, the winds had increased to slightly over 10 knots and swung around to the southwest. The engine was turned off and, driven by a gentle breeze, were able to coast along under sail alone. Since the wind was coming over our shoulder, a preventer was added, securing the boom to one side to make sure the main sail didn’t flip unexpectedly over to the other side of the boat. This configuration kept us rocking from side to side and moving forward , still averaging 5 knots, until midday Monday when the wind vanished. We restarted the engine and motored for the next 30 hours across calm seas, arriving off the coast of St. Pierre late Tuesday evening Sept 2nd under a clear moonlit sky.