It's all downhill from here!

We're finally turning south! We just rounded Point Barrow and gave a toast to the North. Our current position is 71 deg 38'.96N 157 deg 18'.42W COG 266 deg SOG 7.0kts Temp 3.3 deg C So I lied a little, we're actually working a little bit farther west before gybing south but mentally we've all already made the turn. We're one week out of Cambridge Bay and we're almost done with the Northwest Passage. Today we celebrate heading south but we have a few more big celebrations ahead of us too. One for getting to the Bering Strait, one for making into the Pacific, and one for leaving the Arctic Circle. According to Amundsen, and our group consensus, the Northwest Passage officially ends when we make it through the Bering Strait and into the Pacific, making it all the way from the Atlantic via a route around the top of North America. We've had great wind for the past couple days and a great forecast that has this NE wind we're in sticking around for another couple of days at around 20-25kts. This breeze has and will continue to allow us to make around 7-8kts of boat speed. Up until now we've been able to head straight along the rhumb line which has been awesome, but we'll have to wait and see what kind of angles we get after we gybe in a few hours. The only downside to this breeze is that it got really freaking cold again with the wind coming off the ice cap and it's back down to around 3 degrees C and it was snowing earlier. We're looking forward to the palm trees and pina coladas in the pacific...they have those in Alaska right? Anyway we're all just kind of buckled down in routine here now that we're well into the longest ocean passage of our trip. We have another 1200ish miles to go so we're figuring on another week to 10 days before we see Dutch Harbor. Hopefully we can keep coming up with good meal ideas because good food always makes for good spirits. Seeing as it's Sunday today Alex had me make the two of us a full English breakfast during our morning watch with eggs, fresh bread, bacon, baked beans and tomato slices (we don't have any breakfast sausage or hash unfortunately)and right now he's working on dinner which I believe is some kind of fridge vegetable soup... i.e. soup made with whatever vegetables are in the fridge...It'll be warm at least...and hopefully delicious. Other than that there's not much to report from the Nordwind, everything is running smoothly and hopefully it'll stay that way. Actually there is one more point I've been meaning to bring up and that is a very odd eating habit that leaves me vastly outnumbered as the only American on a European cultured boat. This is the matter of cookies, or biscuits as they call them. For me a cookie is a dessert, you have it after lunch or dinner or if you're sneaky maybe you grab one as a mid afternoon snack. Not Europeans or in this case Argentines though, nope for them cookies are for breakfast. Every day its biscuits with their tea/coffee and I'm talking anything from gingersnaps to digestives(some wierd euro cookie) to Oreos. In exchange for eating cookies for breakfast, fruit is a more typical desert option; a banana with caramel or honey or mixed fruit in a bowl with some heavy cream. It seems completely backwards to me, I'm much more inclined to grab a banana, apple or peach in the morning than a pack of Oreos but I guess who am I to judge...plus what kid doesn't secretly love the idea of cookies for breakfast.