Ahoy, shipmates, welcome back to On the Wind. I'm your host, Andy Shell. Sorry for the hiatus. We've been on a 10-day delay, I guess you could say, because I just got back to Sweden from Horta after sailing across the Atlantic with Emma on Ice Bear. It was my sixth Atlantic crossing, the third time I've gone the route from Bermuda to the Azores,

and we sailed like 250 miles longer than you normally would on that route. If you look at our

track on the tracking page on the website, there's a big dip to the south because we had this

weird cutoff low situation where a low pressure system that normally follows

the storm track to the north and on up towards the UK and Ireland got cut off by the

by basically lost the steering currents in the jet stream in the upper atmosphere and plopped

itself right in the middle of our path so in in order to avoid the headwinds, which would

have been on the north side of the low, we sailed pretty far down to the south and around the

bottom of it. We had great sailing the whole time. It was a 12-day passage, 2,100 miles, and we only

motored for 12 hours during a brief calm at the beginning. But a very strange weather pattern this

year.

And anyway, so we were later than I expected by a day or two getting into Horta, and then

we, Horta was so busy that we had to keep the boat on anchor.

So I was supposed to come home a week ago, but couldn't leave the boat unattended on anchor.

So I got to spend a week in Horta, which was also really cool.

Met some cool people.

Big shout out to Mike and Angie, who came and boat sat Ice Bear for the brief period.

It was unattended while Emma and I were flying off the island and Chris and Alex were flying in.

So thanks to those guys.

I know they're podcast fans.

It was fun getting to meet them and getting to meet Matias and his German crew who came out to Ice Bear for coffee and Afika the other day.

So it's always so cool meeting fans in these places that we make landfall.

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