Sailing to Latvia. My stove is trying to burn my boat down

Just pulled out of our slip here in Estonia. It was 30 euros for the night in this marina which seemed a little on the high end but the marina manager gave me a discount because I was the first American this year he said. So I think it was like 25 euros. It's not too bad. I did have showers and a sauna and it's very centrally located. So Estonia is a pretty pretty cool place. It's very uh seems like there's a lot going on here. I remember when I was much younger I visited and uh it seemed like maybe it's it's changed a lot in the last uh 20 years or so. But now I am sailing. We need to we need to sail this boat out of the Baltic really and get uh make our way towards the UK or because we're running out of days on our Schengen visa. So for Americans you get 90 days in Schengen countries which is most of the EU and a few other countries like Norway and Ireland. I guess this is something maybe. Croatia is an exception. It's not Schengen. But the frustrating thing is like so if you spend you know 90 days in Sweden then you go to Finland it's still Schengen so you're you know you got to get out of there. They don't let you stay any longer and it's very difficult to extend it. Fortunately I spent 30 days in Svalbard which even though it's in Norway it's not in Schengen. Russia would also not be Schengen but I've heard it's not a good idea for Americans to be going to Russia and even if I could though it's months and months you have to apply for visas and stuff in advance. So we head towards the UK. So I just put the sails up right outside the harbor. We'll sail around this cruise ship. Looks like it's in rather that rather rough shape. It's been out here for the last few days. Looks like some people painting it maybe. We'll sail around around this little jetty and then we'll make our way to the west. The winds are actually coming out of the northeast right now which is a little bit unusual. Actually as we sail around this cruise ship though it's going to block our wind so the sails might flap for a bit. But I want to make as much westward southwest progress as I can. We have the next four days where the prevailing winds are not prevailing. That would give us it was easy sailing into the Baltic. It shouldn't traditionally be harder to sail out because we'd be going against the wind. But we sailed in with the winds behind us and we'll be sailing out at least beginning with the winds also behind us. So that's kind of lucky that they hold up. About 30 miles down today. The sun is setting and we're out of sight of land. I've decided to sail on the outside of the islands here in Estonia. I just think it's going to be too much work maneuvering in between the tight channels. I'd like to get some sleep tonight. We're kind of outside the shipping lanes and I haven't seen a ton of ships. And here is my planned route. Alternatively I could go inside the islands here. I got a few recommendations for some cool spots in there but sometimes you just got to go with the weather because you can see the wind would be more against us going that way. So day number two of our passage. We're heading to Latvia. It was really tempting to go on the inside of these islands here but I decided to go outside just make it easier on myself. Take advantage of the wind while I have it. But we'll stop at this port up here. It's about 90 miles to go. We've done about maybe 90 miles maybe 100 miles or so. Just need to crank in the sail a little bit more. These fans are a lifesaver now that the temperatures are warming up. It's so hot down here. I just got the new weather forecast which is kind of the cool thing about sailing around here is like I get sail signal like really far out. A lot of the Baltic is covered with 3G apparently. But now the wind's going to be turning more against us so we might end up sailing back over to Sweden. We'll see what happens. We'll just try to cover as much ground as I can. I put all the sail up. I'll try to go fast this way. So one model is saying it's not gonna be too bad. Maybe like get up to 15 knots. The other model is saying going to get up to 30 30 knots gusting to 35 or something so they don't they don't agree so I don't really know what that means. No just almost burned my boat down. I was cooking at an angle so when I went to turn off my little cooker the knob just melted off so it looks like it looked like it was off. But it is not. It was a melted mess and it's still on and now I gotta figure out a way to turn it off. Just picked up. We're healing. Getting over pretty good. A little bit of pounding going on. Staying pretty dry though. It's tempting to bear off and head toward Gotland but if the wind does pick up in a few hours and turns more against us it'd be nice to save Gotland as a you know a beam reach or or even a broad reach. If I bear off now and then the wind keeps turning against us and getting stronger then I'll be you know reaching upwind towards Gotland and I think it's best to kind of stay on our course as long as it's still comfortable. We're still we're still doing maybe three and a half to four knots so we're not we haven't slowed down too much but I mean if I did bear off a little bit we'd be doing five or six knots. It's hard to tough call you know. Day number three of this passage. It's kind of wet and rainy outside. I put a bag over the autopilot because it don't seem to be that waterproof in my experience. We're about seven miles from this Latvian town. I don't think it has a whole lot to offer but the wind's supposed to die in a bit I think and then not start till tomorrow so I might pull in there to stop and wait although the weather forecast has been completely wrong for the last 24 hours so maybe I should just keep on sailing because we do have wind right now. I just noticed some thunder and lightning out there. The wind hasn't been horribly strong. We were heeling quite a bit but I wasn't going to normally put a reef in but I did just because of the thunder and lightning. That's kind of maybe my new rule when I see thunder and lightning for the reason because sometimes there is a squall associated with it. It can be real bad. I did a tack and man it's still raining more. Oh no my wind vane cover my stupid autopilot cover keeps falling off. There we're back in business. It's like super hard rain too. I went out there for 10 seconds to put that bag on there and I just had to put my jacket on. I'm glad I did because it's completely drenched now. Big water droplet rain. Does it have a name? It's coming from a thunder cloud. It's still thundering. It's like it looks like the thunderstorms are all gone so then I was like okay I'll head this way and then just another one comes one after another one after another after another and now I want to boil water for my potatoes but we're heeling over like 45 degrees and now I'm afraid to use the the stove when it's tipped over that much. Also because from this angle it's gonna fall on me. So the wind finally died out and I was able to make my my lunch. Now we're motoring and I think what happened was all the bad weather went away and then it took the wind away from us. But that kind of confirms that it was a good idea to come into port here. We're about maybe 45 minutes of motoring away. I suspect the wind is done for the day so we'll just take a nap, walk around town, maybe go get a few fresh groceries and tomorrow afternoon I think we'll keep sailing trying to make our way towards the Keel Canal. So now we're coming up on that split in Latvia. From what I understand this isn't the ideal tourist harbor to go into but just makes sense for the weather conditions so we're gonna go explore a little bit. The wind picked up just as we were coming in so we have a little bit of wind we maybe we can sail right into the dock. Actually it looks like another squall on the horizon. You can hear lightning or hear thunder. The visibility is not super great to see the lightning but I do hear a lot of thunder now. So we're racing the storm see if we can get it tied up before the next squall. Probably just as we're coming in it'll pour down rain as I'm trying to like tie all the lines and everything. That's how it always happens. Oh yeah let's see if the motor will start. Perfect. There's the hook here. Here we are in Latvia. Slammed into the dock pretty good but that's okay. This boat can take it. I just uh checked in with the harbormaster. It was 25 euros here in um Vince Hills in the marina here. He gave me like the cruising guides and maps and everything. It's really nice actually. I like this this map and this book. I think I'm gonna rep it out because it's such a perfect map for uh kind of planning a trip through the through the Baltic you know. Number two. Number three. Number four. Latvia has a lot of town sculptures. Latvia. They're just standing around. Number eight. Thanks for watching. I thought uh Latvia was actually that was a pretty cool town. It had a weirdly huge number of sculptures and uh it had kind of a cool vibe. Nice beach and everything. Uh in the next video we'll sail to Bornholm Island. I think it's a Danish island outside of Sweden. A really nice place and then continue sailing over to the UK. I've got a little bit behind the video. Just a few weeks behind. I'm currently in Dover in England and I'll make my way to Brighton tomorrow and then towards like Southampton. The boat show. I'm just going as a visitor I think and uh yeah it's a plan. So thanks again for watching. I'll see you guys next time.