A long time cruiser told us recently to always take the gift of the right weather and wind direction to sail when it’s given to us. Today we were given that gift. We knew it would be a good day to sail to Cat Island but it turned out to be a great day. We left the anchorage before dawn this morning to give us plenty of time to sail the fairly long distance north on the Atlantic Ocean from Long Island to Cat Island. We made pretty good time and arrived at our destination after eight hours of glorious sailing. It didn’t hurt at all that the sea state was relatively calm.

We figured we were on the ocean, we had to try and fish again. We put out our Cuban Yo-Yo – the hand line that trolls off the stern of the boat. We knew we might get lucky because we saw fish jumping out of the water all around us. Finally we had a fish on the line! Bill could see right away from the color that it was a Mahi Mahi and it was about twenty pounds and four feet long. Exactly the fish he was hoping for since he knows he likes eating that kind. The fish wasn’t that thrilled about being caught, he was fighting a lot. Bill managed to reel him towards the boat, and as you can kind of see from the picture above, he was almost to the point where we could pull him on board when the fishing line bumped into something sharp on the boat and broke. The fish got away along with one of our lures. Too bad, but we learned a number of things from that attempt. Bill got another lure and put the line right back out off the boat. Most of the day we were in water that was over four thousand feet deep. We were just about to pull the line in as we got to shallower water when Bill realized he had caught something else. He reeled it in and we saw a relatively small, maybe two foot barracuda on the end of the line. We knew we didn’t want to keep him and we were not quite sure how to get him off the hook when he managed to disconnect the hook himself and swim quickly away. We were relieved!

We feel that we have learned some things from this experience and are looking forward to trying again. For now though we are anchored off of Cat Island. We haven’t been to land yet but we will go check it out tomorrow and probably spend a couple of days here until the next weather gift comes along.