I woke for my watch this morning and took over from Morgan. We had been having rain squalls pass over us for the last 3 hours or so. I made some apple cider and went on deck to take a look around. There was a dark looking rain squall approaching us from behind. Curious to see if we might skirt this one or whether it would run right over us, I studied the wind direction and then took another look at this rain cloud. As I was looking at the portion that should pass right over us, out of the rain appears a large freighter, 2 miles distant. As it quickly came into shape out of the rain, I could see it would pass us on our starboard side but it was interesting how close and how quickly it was able to sneak up on us in that rain cloud. Morgan called them up on the radio and they replied saying that they did see us and had us on their radar. It's good to know that these big metal beasts can see us too.

The rain eventually subsided and the sun came out and we ran wing-on-wing into the early afternoon. To get better sail shape on the genoa, Morgan went forward and started rigging the spinnaker pole. Just when we had our hands full with this task, we had a hit on one of the fishing lines. I went back to deal with that when we got a second strike not 20 seconds later!

Morgan endeavoured to drop sail and slow the boat (as I was quickly running out of line), then he took up the second line. Unfortunately that fish got away. The first fish however, I was able to bring alongside which Morgan gaffed and brought on board.

We have photographed, cleaned and processed this fish but even after consulting all reference material aboard we are at a loss as to what species it is. Its shape is very reminiscent of a salmon but it definitely is something else. We'll have to see if we can get an identity when we put in to Maui.

(As I finishing up this post, Morgan had another strike on his line. Turned out to be a little baby tuna (~14 inches long) that we release back into the blue.)