Liam with a catch of Mahi Mahi with his home-made tooth paste tube lure.

We are now in Mayotte.

We arrived here after a 16 day passage- 1843 nautical miles - with boisterous winds and bumpy seas......as expected. The Indian Ocean isn't the Pacific.

The wind speeds ranged between 8 and 22 knots apparent and averaged out at about 14 knots. That was good as it had us moving at an average of 6 - 6.5 knots boat speed. The passage would have taken us only 13 days but we hove-to (that's when you stop the forward motion of the boat and slide sideways) for one day to repair the wind-vane. And we spent two days anchored at Les Isles Glorieuses waiting for favourable winds and reinserting our prop shaft that backed out while anchoring.

We had mixed feeling about leaving Chagos. Another month would have been just fine with us. We were however getting really, really low on fresh food. Pretty well all we had left was half a cabbage and a bit of carrot. We made that half cabbage last for 3 meals with the help of the bean sprouts we'd started sprouting. We had two delicious stir-fries - thank you, Maia! And pad-thai - thank you, Zoe! Then, we turned to our canned vegetables which we livened up with curry sauces.

Of course, coming out the pass we had our fishing lines trailing and caught a blue fin travali. Then not long after, we caught a mahi-mahi! The whooping and hollering was very enthusiastic when we landed that one! Mahi is one of our favourite fish and we hadn't had one in a long, long time.
We lost a lot of lures and were getting low so Liam fashioned a lure out of an empty toothpaste tube. Success - we brought in two Mahi!

Michael noticed that one of our reels was moving so he began to reel it in and I grabbed the other and felt it. There was weight on it, so I thought it was mine that had the fish, but Michael kept on insisting that it was on his line. Our line were crossed a ways out from Gromit, so we thought that maybe one line had hooked onto the one with the fish. We continued to insist that we each had the fish and then after about a minute of reeling is we saw that we both had one and each was a Mahi Mahi.

"I've got it!"
"No, I've got it. It's on my line!"
"No, I've got it!!!"

It was pretty funny and we all had a good laugh!
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There is a Chagos album in the Photo Gallery
Soon there is be a Chagos fish and passage fish album.