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Thula - day 13



If I had to give every one of our days here on board a meaningful title, I would have a really hard time picking one for the day yesterday. “The day on which we lost our Genacker”, “The day on which our fishing luck finally came back” and “The day on which we were all suddenly wearing ridiculous beards” – any one of these titles would probably do. But, first things first:

The day before yesterday we had for the first time taken down all our “white sails” (Main sail, Mizzen sail, Genoa) and instead put up our two coloured sails, the Genacker with our signature dolphin as well as the smaller Mizzen Staysail. We found that this combination was in fact quite good for the moderate trade winds that we had been receiving the last couple of days and hence decided yesterday that we would like to continue with this sail configuration. As we were pulling up the Genacker in the morning, however, disaster struck: As the sail was almost fully up and caught wind for the first time, we heard a loud ripping sound and saw the sail come back down immediately, dropping into the water alongside the boat. After a brief moment of shock we all hurried to quickly pull in the sail from the water – not exactly an easy task considering that the Genacker is by far Thula’s largest sail with a surface area of almost 240sqm (!). Upon closer inspection it turned out that the sail had simply fallen victim to normal wear and tear (after all, the sail was already 10 years old) and, luckily, not to any mistake on our side. Still, from now on we would have to do without our beloved dolphin Genacker What a bummer! It goes without saying that Jimmy instantly computed in his head the new adjusted ETA at St Lucia.

Fortunately, the mishap from the morning did not spoil the atmosphere for the rest of the day. Quite the opposite was the case, everyone was again greatly enjoying the awesome weather and wind conditions and excitedly awaiting the under-1.000-mile-party in the afternoon. For a change, I myself concentrated on optimizing our fishing technique. To maximise the chances of finally landing another fish, I had put out two lines that day: our usual rod and another, much more robust, hand line. This was not a particularly smart idea as it seemed, since we were at that time crossing an area with a lot of seaweed floating on the surface. The weed got entangled in my two hooks again and again, every time resulting in the reel going off and me jumping up and pacing across the boat. Shortly after Lunch (South African fish curry and Salade Nicoise!), however, tables finally turned. The plates were just being taken down into the galley when the reel again started to go crazy – but this time for real! As I was starting to pull in our quarry I was getting worried that my line might get entangled with the other line that was still out. To avoid this, I asked Jimmy to quickly pull in the hand line for me. From then on it was all very confusing. While I myself started to fear that my fish was in fact again a huge patch of seaweed, Jimmy all of a sudden noted dryly that he might in fact have a fish on his line. As he pulled in the line even further and came to the conclusion that he must also have caught a piece of weed I was in turn regaining confidence that there might be a fish on my line after all. At some point of time we even briefly considered the possibility that we had both hooked the very same fish. In the end, it turned out that we had both caught a fish each: I had a fantastic 10 kg yellow fin tuna and Jimmy had a… a…. a…. well, what is that, Jimmy!? Jimmy had landed a fish none of us had seen before. It looked a bit like the combination of a common carp, a brass and some kind of grouper. Not even the study of our (admittedly rather scarce) literature was able to shed light on the mystery of the species that Jimmy had skilfully caught with his hand line. In any case, the fish looked absolutely delicious and was – after a small discussion (Liesel: “But what about ciguatera!?”) – taken down into the galley, as well. In the evening, we were finally able to enjoy our long hoped for tuna sashimi (with the full works of course) as well as the mysterious Jimmyfish. The Jimmyfish turned out to be incredibly delicious with a nice and tasty white meat and very few fish bones. We are still waiting for any side effects to kick in. So far, however, all is well and we are hoping that Jimmy lands another one of these Jimmyfishes anytime soon.

In the late afternoon/evening we finally passed the 1,000 miles post. To honour this historic moment, we all did our very best to dress up particularly nicely, groomed and trimmed our by now quite impressive beards and summoned in the cockpit for drinks (and even cigars). Initially, we were again generously allocated one bottle of beer each. After some persuasion and sweet-talking we were able, however, to secure ourselves even a second beer per person (where have we only gotten to?!). As you can imagine, the party subsequently went wild – some of us didn’t even make it back to their beds. Having already had a deal-closing party, a Bergfest and the under-1,000-mile-party we are currently trying to come up with more occasions for similar parties. The hottest contestants so far are St. Nicholas (which already happens to be today but…oh well!) and possibly a full-moon party.

Happy St Nicholas from the Thula,

Jakob


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