Karl makes me tea at 4AM and 4PM. The early one, 4AM, is the start of my long 6-hour dawn watch. The later one is afternoon tea time. I assume cooking duties as I usually make breakfast for us Karl awakes for his 10AM watch. We eat breakfast from little kids dishes with suction cups on the base. Karl has the sharks and I have a selkie (ok maybe a mermaid). The dividers make it easy to remember grapefruit, vitamin and main course. Yesterday it was Edgewick Feta with artichoke heart frittata made with the last backyard chicken eggs. Today it was halfway there apple cake. We have a tradition of having a cake when we are hallway to our destination and when we arrive. Boosts the mood, marks the moment and fuels the body. Our changing destination plans (Jamaica and not Turks and Cacaos) has confused the routine but it seemed bad to forgo tradition so it was a Miscalculated Halfway Cake morning.

Spent time trouble-shooting GPS blips but that is for another day as I can talk about GPS forever.

Lovely sailing although still fighting a counter current. When you have a good current, it is like running down a people mover at an airport towards your love waiting on the other side of security �" you are fly past everyone. We are running against the people mover right now. The ocean current/sailboat movers is pushing back northward about 24-36 miles a day.

Last night I pulled out my folded well-traveled map of the ocean floor by Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen. Marie was one of the only women involved with early work on the ocean floor at Lamont and this is stunning blue and yellow map that graces so many walls. I wanted to see how she labeled this region. She calls much of the region Hatteras Abyssal Plain and the Antilles Drift. The question Karl and I have been discussing today is how to explain why the Abyssal Plain is so deep (3miles or 5 km). The ocean floor is pretty old here 140 million years. As Marie figured out the ocean floor formed at the rugged mountain range in the middle of the ocean. Here molten rock cools and becomes solid rock but is still pretty warm as is the material underneath. Over time the ocean floor cools and sinks. Why does it sink? Thinking of an analogy has kept us entertained. Many ideas were considered… What floats, lemons yes chocolate no. We ate the chocolate experiments. We settled on marshmallows which remarkably we have aboard. Why we packed marshmallow and not butter is a mystery
. So, in a cup of hot cocoa a marshmallow will float pretty high but if you compress it �" I hit it with a coffee cup it becomes dense just like the ocean floor. The old dense marshmallow floats a lower that the original marshmallow just like the deep old dense Abyssal Plain.

We are getting better at sail changes with drifter (big blue sail) handling getting smoother and less stressful.

More birds now. Longtails a couple of times a day. A couple of petrels doing their walk on water dance to catch plankton. How they put it in their mouth puzzles me.

Bird note: Petrel have been called Jesus Birds as they walk or dance on top of the water in their search of plankton. On other trips the often follow us at night attracted by the compass light. They do close flyby of the helmsperson and make a sound like mad laughter. Sometimes they land in the cockpit prompting warnings on the sailing instruction boat like: watch out for Petrel in the Cockpit. They often divebombed Justin who had the late watch on our New York �" Azores trip. At the first stop, Flores, we anchored in front of a petrel rookery and even at anchor they serenaded us all night with the maniacal calls.