Evening all,
Its the end of our 10th day at sea since leaving Cape Verde. A few dramas yesterday left the atmosphere on the boat less than jovial. Firstly as is the way with our luck if something is going to go wrong it will happen in the pitch black middle of the night. Yesterday morning saw the autopilot rod fail at about 3 in the morning. Drew set about fixing this and then had to recalibrate the entire system once it was reset, not what you want to be doing at 3am!
The second noticeable event of yesterday was myself hooking into and bringing onto the boat one of the most remarkable fish I have ever caught in my life. The size of this Mahi Mahi, the colour of it and the fight it put up on the way in (including jumping out of the water and tail walking for several meters) was just incredible. It seems though that despite us wanting to kill and eat this fish it had other ideas, the split second it took before getting a quick knock to the head was all it needed for a last ditch effort to jump and it jumped clear off the back of the boat (fair play to you my fishy amigo, fight to the last breath). Have to give a fighter like that a bit of respect but that didn't stop me walking around the boat cursing loudly for awhile at the time.
Drew sought to cheer me up as I contemplated the finer details of love and loss by saying "Don't worry buddy, at least you have a lovely chicken dinner to look forward to). This notion may have been enough to drag me out of my wallowing self pity until an hour later Drew went to remove said lovely chicken dinner from the oven. Turns out the lid on the oven proof dish was not exactly oven proof and our "lovely chicken dinner" now had a centimetre thick layer of melted green plastic on top of it. After 5 minutes of me insisting to the two older members of the crew that that food was now poisoned and we most definetly should NOT eat it (you would think they would know better) the chicken was thrown overboard and we had salami and cheese rolls and gave up on the day.
As they say every cloud has a silver lining and ours came last night with winds consistently over 10 knots we all had good watches sailing along and watching for shooting stars happy that we had finally found the elusive trade winds.
A drop in the winds today found us motoring again for a few hours and I took this opportunity to take revenge on the Atlantic fish community. Reeling in a good size Mahi Mahi, that could well have been yesterdays slightly smaller brother coming in for a laugh I felt that I had redeemed some of my lost honour. Drew and Paul insisted that I do the skinning and filleting and we now have tomorrows dinner all lined up!
Drew had another crack at the same chicken dish this evening and it was in fact delicious once the ingredients had been changed to not include melted plastic! As we sail into another incredible open ocean sunset we are crossing our fingers for more wind. I also should add we are pondering how the next five days are going to be now we have run out of beer and less importantly vegetables.
Cheers all!
Adele 1 crew