April 25 – Our Last Full Sea Day before Landfall

I’ve been very bad about posting on the blog. On these many days at sea there hasn’t been all that much to talk about. Almost every day we have had to set our clocks and watches forward an hour. Today it finally caught up with me. I awoke at 10 AM but felt like it was 8 AM. I finally had to take a little siesta this afternoon. I think I like the 25 hour days you get going westbound better than these 23 hour days.

Yesterday was a stormy day. The wind was blowing around 50 mph and the seas were running pretty high. Fortunately they were off our stern and the ship rode very well. All the outside spaces were cordoned off except for the area around the pools. The surf was up in the pools with waves sloshing back and forth and spilling everywhere. Today was a much more calm day with partly cloudy skies and that is the forecast for tomorrow when we arrive in Funchal, Madeira.

Tonight we did our traditional tossing of a message in a bottle overboard. Last October, Al and I tossed one over the side in the Atlantic past Gibraltar. A couple of months later I received an e-mail from a 22 year old Algerian man who had found it on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria. We shall see if this bottle comes ashore where someone finds it.

Well, that’s all for tonight. Our position is currently 33° 7.90N, 22°23.06 W