Well, if you can't make it in time to her, she has to come to you!
St Lucia is a big celebration in Sweden, I think it is a saint that brought us light and we thanked her by killing her.
The 13th of December every year we dress in wihte gowns, light candles on somebodys head (yeah, sometimes it goes wrong), and walk gently singing her praise. Why? It is the darkest day of the year, sort of, from today the days will be longer. And up North they have no daylight at all now, in Stockholm we have from 10 am to 2pm. Well that's far away now from 13 degrees North to 57th North, one would think. Not Erika, she came up this morning and decorated the whole saloon with christmas stuff she has made herself (some look terrible but you are not supposed to say that, then you are a nasty father, but don't you agree? Childrens stuff messes a boat up! Now we have yarn stuff hanging all over, glitter and stars made of what do I know? Don't tell anybody I said this).
Then we dressed as a St Lucia party, Erika being Lucia draped in a broken shower curtain that the kids got down when they had a fight in the shower. No light in the head but each one of us had a candle in our hands. Andreas and I where tomtar (try that on Google translate), Andreas was dressed in my big sweater, made him look funny, and I was dressed in his sweater,
no, just KIDDING!
I had some stuff, what do you call it? Blanket!
Anyway as we approached Ellinors door and opened it, she was in the toilet!
You are not supposed to be there when there is a big procession coming to your room!
When the Nobel price winners get the St Lucia procession in their room for breakfast they are not supposed to be in the bathroom!
So, she had to look at us, and we sang and we sang and we sang. End of story.
Well soon after that we runned into another gale, but this was daylight and it looked less dramatic, but it looks funny when you have a sail big as a towel and make 6 knots. The waves built up today, no rain to keep them down and we had to live with that all day.
According to the weatherfiles we should be on the west side of 50 degree West before noon, and we where, thanks to the gale!
We could see that really nasty low building up behind us as we moved towards the blue skies.
Now the wind has eased off completely as we are on the back of the front, so we are motoring, and that is NOT funny.
That award winning soup of mine had it's third serving on this trip. That together with fresh sour dough bread that Ellinor makes with support of her twin brother. They write mails to each other and develope an improvement in our bread via satellite. That is good. What should we use satellites for other than that?
We HOPE we can make landfall in the island of St Lucia (do they have this tradition there?) within 4-5 days.
The wind is not much to count for, but we will see!