Great sailing and 200nm to go!
19 January 2015 | South Atlantic Ocean
Russ and Laurie
We had a nice sail through the night, making good progress. The wind is up and steady over 20kts from the stern, so we're sailing down wind and a bit to lee so we'll probably have to switch the Gennaker over to the starboard side at some point to make our wind angles. Very nice downwind sailing with 200 nm to go! We had a bit of excitement this morning, one of our large reels started singing...finally! However when we started to tighten the drag, we saw a huge marlin erupt behind the boat! Mike estimated it at 300lbs as it made a huge splash as it tail walked and surged behind the boat. We couldn't stop it from taking line out, it was too powerful, and eventually it jumped high one last time and broke the line with it's bill. We got most of the line back wth the broken end heavily abraded. Unfortunately there is a large marlin out there with a new lip ring...hopefully it will rust out in a few days. There's no way we could have boarded that fish, but he sure was a great sight to see behind the boat. We hope the wind holds out, we're looking at landfall tomorrow afternoon/evening at this rate and all is well.