It is now official - our new boat has been registered and licensed with the name 45North.

Representing the Latitude of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada being at 45 degrees North and 66 degrees West. Ok all you Haligonian boaters; we rounded up the 44.6 degrees North to 45 because 44 North was already a registered boat in Canada.

We started the process the first week of August by submitting three names to Transport Canada to confirm that our choice is unique and not already registered to another Canadian flagged boat. At the time we wanted to call our new catamaran Makin' Waves. The forms were fairly simple but there were quite a few. The agent who worked on our file is Jocelyne and she was extremely helpful. Our first mistake was that we could assign the boat shares 50/50 between us. Turns out that we only own 64 shares and the Canadian Government owns the 36. Why? One theory from the Victorian era suggests that boats had 100 shares but 36 of these would be taken in the form of a tax, leaving the owner(s) with 64 shares. Similarly some say many years ago the British Government of the day used to hold 36 of 100 shares enabling them to requisition the boat in times of war leaving the owner(s) with 64 shares. So nice to have a partner who is a freeloader on the bills.

The second lesson is the form I filled out to calculate the weight (displacement) was not acceptable to Transport Canada (T.C) for catamarans like ours. We had to hire a tonnage surveyor firm who is approved by T.C.. It is a simple 30 minute process for the surveyor to take 4 measurements and some pictures that they plug into a formula and out pops that calculated weight. So in September we started searching for firms to find that many of them were not qualified by TC. We finally found an approved surveyor called Bureau Veritas who also has an office in La Rochelle. We sent off an email to the France office but they didn't respond. Tried to phone the office but the phone number on their website was not working. Finally I contacted the office in Canada for them to provide me with a name and contact to connect with. It is now January 13th. Jean-Marie was prompt to respond with a contract and their fees. For a 30 minute process they billed out at $83.33 CAD per minute. A few days later they met our dealer at the boat and took the measurements and a few pictures. We really wanted this all done before we arrived but nothing happened on our file. I drove out to their office the day after we arrived and spoke to the surveyor. Strangely he asked when we needed it done.

This afternoon we finally received the survey and Jocelyne at TC was awesome to complete are application and issue us our vessel license this afternoon making us and 45North legit.

Coincidently our graphics gal Lily showed up this afternoon to put the decals on the stern.

So nice to get our Halifax Canada on the sugar scoops.

Thank you to Jocelyn, Lilly, our racing crew back in Halifax for being the sounding board on boat names and our family for helping select from the many logo design choices Lilly sent.

Next will be a bottle of French champaign to do our boat christening.

PS. The factory lists our boat at approx 13.6 Ton but the surveyor and their formula calculates her at a whopping 25.50 tonne. So who really knows. I know that we brought over twelve 70 lb bags of boat gear and have been shopping non stop since we got here so maybe Todd is right to say it will be a slow going vessel. We will soon know accuracy of the polars below (although Elba Hull #1 crossed the Atlantic in 18 days. Not bad.)

I can hear our non racing followers saying what the heck is this? Introducing the polar diagram which was provided by the factory. This one shows how fast the boat would go under three different wind velocities showing boat speeds for 8, 16 and 20 knots of wind. The angles on the compass represent the direction the wind is coming over the windward side. Based on the wind speed, angle and what sails we would typically have up for that combination give you the boat speed that is shown in the circles running from 0 knots of apparent boat speed up to 14 kts.

So our fastest sailing according to this polar is in 16 knots of wind at an apparent angle to the boat of 110 degrees and we would have our full main up along with a downwind spinnaker. At 20 knots of wind at the same wind angle it is 11 knots of boat speed because we would have less sail area up.

Note that the tightest angle of sailing into the wind as noted in this polar is 52 degrees. We have been able to sail at 50 degrees close hauled.

If you have not subscribed to our website go to the main page at the bottom and sign-up so you get instant notifications on all our blog posts.