I am very excited to be writing this blog. We are finally back onboard the boat and underway. So we are starting on four days continuously at sea, and I think we are all very happy to start this leg of our trip. New York was fun, but it is time to get down to business and Charleston. It is very cold in New York so we are looking forward to going south to warmer weather.

Getting ready for this leg of the journey has been interesting. We had to provision for six days. While we will only be at sea for four days, you never know what might happen so you want a day or two extra just in case. So we placed an online order with Whole Foods who delivered an amazing amount of food. We had to plan each dinner and lunch for the next six days and write it out as we don't know who will be cooking each night - it will depend who is on watch (more of that later). It took us about 45 min to unload all of the bags, put away everything and make sure we had what we needed tonight for dinner (also more to come).  Each morning we will have to check what is for dinner that night so we can take the meat out of the freezer and have it ready for whomever is cooking that night. It felt like we could feed a small army with all of the food we have. The good news is we have a lot of fresh fruit and veggies that won't go bad in the next 6 days.

This leg of the adventure has been the scariest to me and made me the most nervous. Questions like:

“How will I get enough sleep?”

“How does dinner work, if you’re sleeping when it is ready?”

“How do I remember when to take my MS meds?”

… These have been running through my head. So how do we do this 24 hour sailing? We do three hours on and six hours off. 15 min before a watch change you go and wake the person who is going to cover for you and they get up, so they are all ready when the time comes to switch. This will be very important in the middle of the night when it is very, very cold.  I have an alarm for my MS meds, but dinner I am still figuring out.

I have done overnight sailboat racing at home and I am approaching this like this; when you are down you sleep, and when you are on watch, you look out and try to keep warm. We have just had a week off from sailing so we should all be well rested and by the second day I bet we will have this down to an art. I promised to tell you what is for dinner when I am doing the blog and tonight it is chicken wrapped in bacon. One interesting side note - US and Danish bacon are apparently very different US (ours) has more fat and is shorter and not as stretchy, so Klaus made me cut the fat off the bacon to try to make it more like the stuff in Denmark. We learn new things every day about how we differ and how we are similar. I am very excited to see what the next four days brings. They are expecting a cold front for about six hours on Monday. I am not sure if I want to be up top or down below when that hits. We will see what will come of it.

Report by Bosun Betram:

180 out of 650 nautical miles from New York City to Charleston. We are keeping a fine average of 7 knots over ground covering approximately 170 miles per day. The wind is still right out of south, which happens to be where we are heading - so unfortunately we are not getting much help from our sails, but rely on our solid main engine to take us down the latitudes.

The days are cool and sunny, the nights colder and calm. We are still looking forward to warmer weather!

Local time on board is 18:44 and our current position is 37,56.34N , 75,1.79W