can we help
+44(0)1983 296060
+1 757-788-8872
tell me moreJoin a rally

Menu

Endeavour of Cork - catch of the day



Conor here from Endeavour. well it was great to get going and we are now settling into our watch routine. Basically we need one person on watch the whole time in case a ship comes over the horizon. We change every 2 hours and each of us has at least two watches to cover. When we are on deck at night we always wear lifejackets and we make sure to clip ourselves on to the boat if alone at night. We run a line up each side of the boat so that we can clip onto it if we need to go forward for any reason. The boat has an autopilot and we can set this to a given bearing and leave the helm to do any jobs needed. We use the autohelm sparingly though as we need to manage our power usage. Different boats have different methods of generating power. We have two solar panels and we use the engine to supplement this. Because we have had some dodgy batteries we have used the engine a lot in previous legs but hoping this will improve. As for diesel we have 200 litres in the tank and we are carrying and extra 240 litres in jerrycans . We could probably run the engine for a week with that so I predict we'll still have loads of disel when we get to St Lucia. The BIG news for today is that we caught a big tuna, probably 15 to 20 pounds. Dermot is our fisherman and he had a line trailing way out the back for a couple of hours. He attached this line to a bungee chord as this absorbs the shock travelling at 7 knots.So suddenly we heard a twang and Dermots day was made. He subdued the tuna and poured some vodka into his gills to assist and has now about 20 tuna steaks. So tuna for lunch and dinner i think. Unfortunately not all the crew are fish lovers but there isnt much else to catch out here! More than one or two squeamish so the fish had to be filleted on the bow. Fortunately i had got a carpenter in Cape Verdes to make up a wooden tray with a 1 inch lip all around to assist with filleting. As I write we have about 11 knots of wind and Laura is helming . The cruising spinnaker is up and we are rocking along at about 7 knots..not a bother to her..Forecast remains light and settled for the next few days. Not another boat to be seen anywhere on the horizon..we seem all alone out here..We will shortly make contact with the other boats or at least some of them on SSB radio and find out where they are and what conditions they are experiencing. We have plenty of photos to confirm the size of the tuna...We are still trying to catch up with the fleet..over

--




Previous | Next