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Starblazer - 28/01/2016 – The ones that got away,



This blog will most likely be a predominantly fishy tale. On the way to
South Africa John had a couple of bites which ran away with all his line so
he determined that he needed a bigger reel which would hold more line. That
was his Christmas present. It has a rather nice feature in that there is a
two speed gear box for retrieving the line, low speed when you have a fish
on the hook and high speed when you want to wind in a lot which a fish ran
away with then spat out!

The one feature lacking is a cast iron guarantee that the fish will give in
gracefully and accept that it is hooked. Yesterday was like many other
days, the line went out when John got up in the morning and came back in
late in the evening, but there was some excitement during the day. We now
know that the bigger fish liked his blue and silver squid shaped lure. On
previous days he had bites but they never stayed hooked long enough for John
to put up much of a fight before they considerately spat out the squid.
Yesterday’s first bite was a solid connection, perhaps too solid. The reel
screamed out so John increased the drag a little, the fish paused then ran
away again, John added a little more drag, about half the line was out when
it suddenly snapped and the fish got away with the squid lure and over a
hundred metres of 50 pound breaking strain line. Undeterred, John reloaded
the reel, found another lure and put the line out again. A few hours later
the reel screamed as the rod bent double, John set about playing the fish a
little more slowly, he saw it leap out of the water a long way behind us
then suddenly the line went slack and the fish managed to spit out the lure.
During my first off watch John suddenly noticed the rod bent double, the
line was pulling out but he had forgotten to set the clicker so had no
audible warning. He was a lot more patient this time and eventually towed
the fish for nearly two hours before it decided to stop playing with him and
swam away! (John: the lure was actually two blue squid about 600mm apart.
The front one had the squid part almost pulled off the hook, the back one
had two legs of its triple hook broken off. It’s now re-build time!) We
will have fish for dinner soon but it might have to come out of the freezer.

We sailed all day, making a good speed. The problem we face is that to
arrive in daylight we either need to go a lot faster or a lot slower, on
current speed I predict an arrival in the early hours of the morning. We
still have 744 nM to go so that is at least five days unless the wind really
pipes up. We have already decided that if the wind drops much below 10
knots we will motor otherwise that would reduce our speed too far. There is
a fine line between gently meandering at 4 knots and striding purposefully
forward at 6 knots: 9 knots of breeze gives us about 4 knots, 13 knots of
wind usually translates to 5.8 or better. Currently we are making 6.6 in
14.5 knots of wind, we don’t hit the heady heights of 7 knots with less than
18 knots of wind. We made great speed from Cape Town to St Helena because
the wind was mostly above 20 knots!

The cook was feeling lazy so dinner was sausages with couscous and one of
the packs of yesterday’s left over ratatouille. The beauty of couscous is
that it cooks itself while the ratatouille is being heated through.

Joyce


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