Day 13 - 689 miles to go

June 16, 2008 Monday 1am - mid watch - 34d 57' North 44d 33' West
We are headed directly for the Azores. Yay! At last! We've had strong winds and favorable currents all day and so have really added the miles. Yesterday, we saw winds that gusted to 33 knots, but mostly in the 20's. We carried full sail through all of that. Of course, all that wind kicked up some gnarly seas and the motion was not the best. I for one am looking forward to the pleasures of the harbor. But it isn't all that bad. We've eaten well and at sunset the other day, we saw the fabled "green flash". We'll put up some pictures when we get to the internet. I understand that the library on Flores has free internet.
We are starting to hear about bad weather in the vicinity of the Azores. It is a long range forecast so may improve by the time we get there. Normally, the Azores are bland from a weather standpoint.
We are putting away our hurricane worries though. We are now so far from the normal storm tracks that the probabilities of getting one here are less than getting hit by a falling airliner.
I've enjoyed getting emails from you and Merritt has enjoyed getting them too, but we have used so much time and bandwidth that we now have to start conserving by not sending as much. With Sailmail, we only have 90 minutes of connect time per month. Now that we are so far away, each connection takes longer to upload and download. So, we'll have to let the blog do the talking for a few days until we get to Flores.