After an uneventful night of sailing with just one and a half reefs in the main and a full Genoa both on the starbrd side, Captain wanted to pole out The Genoa at 07:00. So after he kindly made us both a cup of hot, reviving coffee, we put the pole on the port side and the main boomed out with the preventer to starbrd, with the Hoyt staysail sheeted in tight in the middle. By 08:30 the fickle wind took a holiday and we resorted to the iron genny for a couple of hours. Big puffy clouds came up, looked threatening, and passed with none effect. At 13:00 we heard the happy zing zing zing of the deep sea rig on the big rod. Fish on! What fun we had taking turns reeling as the fish would then pull back out what we’d reeled in. After 35 minutes of this, we managed to get it just up to the boat, and it dove straight down. Within two minutes the purple squid lure popped up unharmed and our fish was gone. What ever it was, we didn’t really want it anyway. It was big, and it was weird, it never once came to the surface to fight the way a pelagic fish usually does. Even the tunas , after they dive initially, will pop back up and give you a lively show. This critter today was all business...no show, no surface fight. We could see a long grey form...no green, yellow or blue of the yummy fish. Perhaps it was a shark...we won’t ever know, but it was a fun diversion, and we had egg rolls and sweet chilli sauce with our vegetable stir fried rice for supper instead of the fish dinner I had planned. By suppertime, we seemed to have abdicated the shipping channel. All yesterday we had a cargo ship or another in sight, coming or going from east to west or west to east, but now haven’t seen any since this afternoon late. The wind is light and variable..east, east south east, south east, east...11-13 knots, though there are big cloud galleons sailing across the sky, we’ve not had any squalls from them today. A really nice sailing day crossing the Indian Ocean on out Sweet Dream.
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