We neglected to post yesterday. No reason, we just forgot.

Yesterday was our 13th wedding anniversary. Yulia and Kirill gave us a beautiful agate sea turtle. In Russia, it is symbolic of a happy family. Yulia and Kirill’s generosity continues to touch our hearts.

Gift from Kirill and Yulia – Agate Sea Turtle

A brief recap of yesterday: We were close enough to a storm to the north of us to experience confused, whitecapped seas. When Kirill was on watch from 8:00 p.m. to midnight, the boat speed reached 12.1 knots when it was pushed by waves. If you aren’t a sailor, trust us, that is very fast!

Both Kirill and Yulia had challenging watches. Things were calmer by the time Michael and I arrived on the scene at 4:00 a.m. We had to point farther south than we wanted to go, but it was not a problem.

We moved our clocks forward two hours yesterday afternoon. We are a bit ahead of the actual time now, but close enough for the four of us.

Back to today: We had the midnight to 4:00 a.m. watch this morning. Quite uneventful for us, less so for Yulia. The autopilot stopped working when she was on watch. That hadn’t happened before. She awakened Kirill, who fixed it by turning it off and back on again. (Does that remind you of how you fix your computer at work? Ha!)

After that happened, Yulia decided to take the helm herself for two hours just for more practice. She provided such a smooth ride that the rest of us overslept!

In case you are wondering, we changed the subject line of this post because we are now considering sailing to Madeira instead of the Azores. There is a huge weather front to the north of us. (Or as Trump would say, “Yuge!”.) It is about 1500 miles in diameter. A good front to avoid!

At this time (1400 hours), sailing is good and comfortable. It is sunny. Kirill is relaxing and sharpening his machete. We changed to a slightly more northeasterly direction (58 degrees) to avoid the front to the south of us. We are sandwiched in between two fronts. Whoo hoo!

Kirill

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