Hoisting the Jolly Rogers in Halifax Harbour

Our last stop on this trip before heading home again was Halifax, Nova Scotia. Neither Kirsten nor I had ever been there before. And, I don't mind saying it's a fantastic little place. It's just a great combination of old and new, and being right there on the coast, you can't beat it. We could definitely see ourselves living in a place like that.

We didn't have a lot of time scheduled for sightseeing in Halifax. We pretty much just planned to drive in mid-morning, tour around and then catch our 5 p.m. flight back to Edmonton. Mom and Merrill had better ideas though. Having been there before, they knew that you could go on these 1-2 hour sailing tours in the harbour. Well, they had me at 'sailing'. We used to have a sailboat, a small two-person racing boat called a Force 5. Merrill, Darryl and I took sailing lessons and used to get out to the South Cooking Lake sailing club now and then. A sailing club in land-locked Alberta you say? Yes, it's true. It really was a good time! But, we all got too busy to keep it up, and eventually we just stopped altogether, sadly. So an opportunity to go sailing on a full-sized schooner in Halifax harbour wasn't a chance we wanted to pass up.

We left the cottage in P.E.I. at 5 a.m. and drove the 4+ hours to Halifax, arriving near 10 a.m. and booked ourselves on the "Mar".





Fortunately for us, the conditions that day were ideal, sunny and not too cool out on the water, with a healthy amount of wind. Once we were onboard and taxied out of dock, the Jolly Rogers were raised and Darryl and I got to hoist both the massive main sail and the jib. I have to admit, although I know the crew probably love having passengers do the hard work (and it was hard), I was almost giddy at the chance ;-)




The tour was about 1 and 1/2 hours, taking us out around the original island fortifications built by the British in the 1800s and then back into port. It was short but sweet and admittedly more than enough to get me daydreaming about moving to the coast, buying a boat and sailing to Cuba!




So that's it. Our 2006 Canadiana summer vacation comes to an end on a very high note.