22/05/2010 - First fish!

So first thing we are told is that the water temp has reached 29ºC!,.. although there probably won’t be a hurricane!  We should still be vigilant for squally bits though and the waves testified to the fact that we were not out of the unpredictable weather yet!

As we were doing “WT tasks” sophie walked down one of the breezeways, only to be met with a wall of water as a wave ploughed into the side of the ship… “and to start the 8-12 wet t-shirt competition..” she quipped as she walked by a group of us hard at work sanding down rusty tools! The perils of her profession!

Shawn excitedly came up to the quarterdeck to announce that we were going to Antigua before we reached Panama due to our “strenuous” trip so far…on further investigation it turned out we are actually stopping in Anguilla for a few days on Monday!!  The mood changed drastically on board at this news as everyone excitedly exclaimed what they were looking forward to “swimming”, “ice cream”, “rum”, etc,…  As it turns out the low that is threatening the hurricane is causing the normal easterly trade winds to curve and they are now more southerly which would mean motoring, so instead a few days on a small Caribbean island while it passes and the winds turn again seemed a good idea,.. everyone agreed!

Fishing after lunch was an exciting affair as I received a definite bite and excitedly told Julie and Dan (who happened to be on the Aloha Deck at the time) to pull in the 2nd line so that that line wouldn’t get tangled with the behemoth I was about to bring on deck!  As it turned out, their line had a small mahi-mahi  on it, whereas mine obviously decided to let go,.. I still maintain that the fish jumped from my line onto theirs,… they didn’t even realise they had a fish on the line until it was a couple of metres from the ship!!  Talk about luck!!!

Mate Mike came down and decided that despite being a beautiful fish it was too small and we threw it back, not without a few photos first though!

We have decided that the unit of measurement for the fish caught is to be the “Bob”,..  this Mahi-Mahi was about a 5th of a Bob..—Bob is unsure how to take this honour!

I tried to get a couple of hours sleep in the afternoon after the exciting mornings events, and managed it,.. I awoke after a good couple of hours and felt great!  Ready for the night watch!

Night watch was pretty uneventful , a little bit of trimming of the sails, I was on lookout for the first hour,.. I warned the watch that they were not to make any decisions without me as last time I was on first lookout I returned to find I had been chosen to be the watch cross-dresser!

We had a couple of squally bits, but a generally quiet watch and the boat was more or less level when we retired at midnight!

 

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