Tenerife to Cape Verde Wed 1st Nov
01 November 2017
MS
It is 7:30pm (1 hour behind UK) and just one more night sail before we will be in Mindelo, Sao Vincente, CV. The Cape Verde's are approximately 400 miles off the coast of Africa (just west of Senegal and The Gambia) and we have just 67 miles left of 825 miles from the Canaries to sail. We keep saying "how the heck have we managed to get here" and have to keep pinching ourselves that we have sailed all this way in our own little yacht. Probably more than half the rally boats have reached Mindelo today but we hope to arrive certainly by 10am tomorrow 2nd Nov. Life on board has not been as arduous as we thought. Time just slips by trimming sails, chatting on the radio, fishing, preparing food (takes twice as long when your struggling to balance!), and of course having little naps. There is a quite a bit of fishing competition going on between the rally boats and much discussion about putting out a teasers line, in other words a line mimicking a small shoal of fish creatin g noise to attract the larger predators. As we were not having too much luck on the fishing we thought we had better try rigging up a teaser line. I used some old mackerel lures, feathers, little plastic sand eels etc, putting out about six in a line. Our rod was out on the opposite side with the expensive green and yellow skirted squid looking lure that we were hoping to catch a tuna or a mahi-mahi . A few hour passed and I was checking the lines when I suddenly noticed a shark about 2 metres in length swimming right up to the back of the boat. We watched it for at least 5 minutes swimming menacingly from side to side when it slipped back and suddenly we had a strike on our fishing rod. The line was bitten clean off and we watched the shark jumping and thrashing about on the water obviously trying to remove the hook from its mouth. We just needed the music from Jaws to complete the picture!
