Day 30 Vergi to St Petersburg

The challenge is to arrive at the Russian customs border point at Konstantin in our allotted window which was 8-11am on Friday. This makes it quite tricky as you do not know what the wind direction or strength is likely to be. Worse still once we reach the Russian border we are expected to follow the shipping lanes which makes tacking impossible. The Russians just do not get it but they are just as mad with their own people as well. People are not free to move about in Russia even today, if you move to a location you have to register in that location and your registration might be denied forcing you to live elsewhere. It seems that there is a growing practice to live illegally ignoring the rules, I digress.

We leave two hours after Crystal Venture fearing that we will arrive too early. When we pull away the wind direction is awful and given the shallow waters the sea state was unpleasant. However we decided to sail in the wrong direction as we had plenty of time and that made it much more comfortable and after a couple of hours the sea state improved as it both deepened and the wind speed moderated.

"Sea Crusader… Sea Crusader… Sea Crusader" blared out of the radio, " Russian Coastguard this is Sea Crusader go ahead" (No one announced who they are in the Baltic ration protocol is very badly observed). "This is ESTONIAN coastguard Sea Crusader what was your last port of exit" The voice was stern and angry that I had thought he was Russian. I then explained that we had checked out of Tallinn and had simply broken the journey at Vergi and had not gone ashore. What difference it makes I really don't know! He seemed happy with that and we carried on, I would have carried on anyway as we are not going back to Estonia anyway!

Night drew in and Sapphire III passed us just as the sun set on the horizon and we entered another night of darkness. Linda went to bed to catch up on a few hours of much needed sleep.