i tell it to start the transfer and it just sits their saying connecting. is there a port on my firewall that i need to open?
It’s trying to connect to the tracker at that point. This is a straightforward HTTP connection, and your listen port doesn’t come into it yet.
The message, if continued, means there’s some problem connecting to the tracker, so a look at your trackers tab is in order, to see if it’s something you can do something about. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, and sometimes just waiting works.