This morning I made my final run over to the Island Water World fuel dock, filling up our jerry jugs with diesel and then mounting them on our deck. Leu Cat is awash with fuel, now carrying about 250 gallons. We are riding a bit lower in the water with all of that weight (about 1700 pounds) on board.

While I was doing that, Mary Margaret fired up the A/C and the oven and made more of her South African seed crackers and babaganoush. I had bought some more eggplant a couple of days ago just for this occasion. They both turned out wonderful!

As we grow impatient to start our crossing to the Azores, we still daily check the weather patterns across the North Atlantic. Right now, the second of the three nasty long line of fronts is moving across the route we plan to take. I am glad we have waited while these three fronts move out of our way. Here is the last gale warning for this second front, issued by NOAA: "LOW 46N41W 984 MB MOVING NE 15 KT AND RAPIDLY INTENSIFYING. FRONT EXTENDS FROM 38N50W TO 35N62W. FROM 34N TO 48N BETWEEN 35W AND 50W...AND BETWEEN 31N AND THE FRONT WINDS 25 TO 40 KT. SEAS 8 TO 18 FT." I have bolded the last part, which would have impacted us if we had started our crossing.

The third front is moving off the coast of the Southeastern US but now appears that it will stay north of our route. I was all excited about that development until I noticed that another low, this time coming down from the New York bight, moves into our route and then, in a week, just stalls. In the process of stalling it sucks up another front, this one coming from the southeast, right into it. All of this unstable weather makes our timing to leave this Sunday, dubious. I cannot express how frustrated I am.

I am concerned that my patience will wear thin and I will just say, "screw it, let's go". At that point, I hope Mary Margaret will come and grab my shirt collar, slap me around a bit and knock some sense back into me. Sigh!

To this blog, I am posting a photo of the GIRB file for June 16 that shows the stalled low and the front that came up from the southeast being sucked up into it. The black blobs are the projected areas of storms. They are not as black as they are projected to be on the 15th, so that is encouraging. It appears that the low will be running out of steam by the 17th so maybe we can leave Sint Maarten a few days before since the storm area is about 4 days of sailing to the north of us.