Joanna - Blog update from Joanna

Feel free to edit as you see fit! Thanks for pulling the newsletter together we really enjoy reading it.

Deadliest Catch - a warning from the sea?

Joanna has been incredibly lucky (and skilled?) with our fishing endeavours so far and all the crew were pleased to see our efforts recognised with us topping the ARC fishing leaderboard yesterday - who’s going to take the top spot from us!?

We enjoy hearing what others are catching and are very jealous of the elusive (for us at least) Mahi-mahi which others seem to be managing to catch. It turns out after reading a fishing book that we had in-fact caught a Mahi-Mahi and that it also goes by the name Dorado #amaturehour

We took a day off fishing to finish off the left over fish and remaining perishable meat which we have onboard. For lunch we had freshly made tuna stake burgers and for dinner chicken fajitas - yum.

It was a strange sensation not having fish for dinner and while eating the fajitas, one of the crew said “it’s nice not having fish for dinner this evening”. Literally within seconds, something came hurtling out of the air clearing the helm (4 meters high), swooped down into the cockpit, smacked one of the crew members over the head (no injuries apart from serve shock and fishy slime in their hair) and landed on our plates. What was it? A flying fish.

We’re currently debating if this chain of events was the sea punishing us for going back to land based-food (hopefully) or if the sea kingdom was getting vengeance for us eating it’s brothers and sisters…(if so send help).

Things which are breaking on the boat - FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) at sea

It sounds like a few things have been breaking on various boats but great job fixing them - I’m sure there’s been some ingenious, out of the box solutions. Joanna has been been fortunate enough not to have any major issues so far (touchwood) but has been feeling left out…

To satisfy our FOMO we’re come up with a tried and tested way to break part of your boat and get yourself a new break block in three simple steps:

1. While hoisting the spinnaker, make sure the sail starts to go into the water to create a sense of panic and urgency among the crew.

2. Make sure the spinnaker halyard gets tangled around another line so you have to move it from its usual winch (directly in front of it and in the direction of load) to another winch (positioned exactly 90 degrees from the halyard’s break block). Continue hoisting on the new winch.

3. Patiently wait 5 seconds and you’ll be rewarded with a spectacular bang as the plastic housing of the break block flys off and it’ll no longer work.

The spinnaker survived but we’ll be taking a visit to the local chandlers in St. Lucia for a new break block…in the meantime we rerouted the rigging onto a new route.