Sailing Log June 21, 2026
Charlottetown to Murray River, PEI
Distance: 50.6nm
Time: 9hrs
Motoring: 1hrs
We were ready to go at 8am as the folks at the marina told us they would help us out. After a few conversations with Denver, the only person who showed up at 8am (an eager and nice young man with one summer experience at the marina) said Marcus, his manager, isn’t answering his phone and that he would be willing to help. By 8:45 and a quick call to the marina office, which went straight to vmail (we all know what that implies) it was decided that if there was no further news from Marcus, we would slip our lines at 9am and make do with Denver.
At 9am, Denver advised that Marcus is taking care of his family and wouldn’tbe available for another 30 minutes and Ben doesn’t start till 10am, we asked Denver to grab his skiff. We attached a line from his boat to one of our stern cleats. Released all of all lines except for the bow. Instructed Denver to slowly pull the stern away from the dock as Christine let out the bow line. With a slight wind blowing dead ahead of us, as we started to bring the stern out, the bow increasingly got wind on her port side and we started to get at right angle with the dock. Perfect. Once we were fully at right angle and had enough distance from the dock, we released our line with Denver and put the boat in forward gear and made our way out but not before hitting bottom. We were in less than 6ft of depth! Put extra throttle and motored our way through the mud and into deeper water and were finally able to clear the marina and the breakwater.
Once out into the channel with the tide going out we were doing 8 knots. Clear of the channel we hoisted the sails and were on a broad reach in 10 to 13 knots of wind for the entire trip and doing on average 5 to 6 knots.
As we approached Murray River, the winds picked up considerably and shifted from a broad reach to beam and then close haul with winds gusting to 20 knots. The last bit proved to be the most challenging as in this area of PEI, lobster season is on and we had some pretty challenging maneuvering to do.
Once we got into shallower waters, we were out of the fishing zone and the winds quickly died down, allowing us to quickly drop sails and begin our approach to our anchorage.
The approach was not as sinuous as Pugwash but no less daunting as some of the channel markers had been moved when compared to our charts. We ended up anchoring in 15ft just off the main channel.
Hopefully it’ll be a quiet night and we won’t be woken with fishing boats going by in the wee hours of the morning.
Comments