People often assume that life on a boat means that whenever you fancy some fish for dinner, all you have to do is put out a baited line and a couple of minutes later you find a juicy fish on the end of it. This is a total myth. After 7 years of trying to do this and having to return our meagre catch (4 fish) to the sea because they were too small, we considered ourselves to be cursed.

At anchor on the island of Kastos, we saw one of the crew of a neighbouring boat setting out with a spear gun early one evening. 'That's it', I said, 'I'm going to give it another go.' We don't have a spear gun but we do have a fishing rod and so we tried our luck yet again. After the second cast, there was a fish on the line and it was big enough to keep! Was this a fluke? I tried again and caught another one, this time a little bigger. We couldn't believe our luck with the third one which was definitely big enough to be served up in a restaurant. And so, we kept on going, how could we stop, and caught a total of 8 fishes of which we put 3 back as they were too small.

After de-scaling and gutting them, Chris got the cockpit kitchen going and we had fresh fish for dinner. We were so happy to have finally broken the fishing curse!