27th May

01 27.236 N

82 13.875 W



Weather; muggy, overcast and humid with rain showers, wind between 5 and 23 knots, waves 1-3 metre



I'm a bit late doing today's update as I had a really hard time getting any sleep last night and consequently fell asleep in the cockpit once Gerry surfaced this morning. Where was I when I left off yesterday? Oh that's right we were heading along the coast still, well that all came to a screaming stop at midday as we changed tack and turned to head towards the Galapagos. At that time we had a wind speed of around 5 knots and it was just at the point where we could sail, albeit very slowly and with the white flappy things doing a good impression of washing drying in the breeze so we continued to motor sail to begin with. This all came to an end 2 hours later when the wind kicked up and we had a good 15knots which meant we could deploy the jib and switch the motor off Ð blissful silent sailing along. But I've got ahead of myself here and left out the most important part of the day, Gerry had put the fishing stick out much to my amusement with a red feathered lure on the end Ð
I'm not sure what he was trying to attract but 15 minutes after sitting back down the reel began to spool out, surely not a fish on the line! Gerry jumped up first as he was closest and began to reel in at the same time yelling for me to look behind us Ð we had hooked a sail fish and it was leaping out of the water trying to dislodge the hook. As I turned to look behind me Gerry let out another whoop and then announced that it had gotten away Ð boo and hiss! I never did get to see it but Gerry was so damn excited about it that it's a shame it didn't even get to make the photo album. When he finished reeling in the line he found that the entire hook, line and sinker had been chomped through and was gone Ð guess that sail fish really wanted a red feather dinner! So that was our first strike and one that got away. Gerry rigged up another hook with a pink feather lure this time (really don't know why we have feather lures, I think Gerry must have picked them!) and back in the wa
ter the line went with both of us commenting that we had done our dash for the day and we both sat back down for less than five minutes as the line started to spool out again almost immediately, once more Gerry began reeling in something heavy but didn't get to see it break the water surface as it managed to chomp through the line almost straight away, a repeat of the reeling in an empty line with no hook line or sinker followed Ð at this rate we were going to be out of lures before we get to the end of the day! Third time lucky? Well the line went out, we sat back down and waited this time it went off again after about 15 minutes, we both jumped up and Gerry began the reeling in process yelling for me to look behind us the fish on the line was leaping out of the water and we could distinctly see it was a Mahi Mahi and a good size to reel in and have for dinner but he was putting up one hell of a fight to get off the hook. Gerry managed to get it half way back to the boat b
efore it succeeded in making its escape Ð so we were now 2 lures down for 3 strikes and not a damn fish to show for the effort, good job I had made chilli bake for dinner (thinking of you Lee and laughing out loud). At the time of the strikes we were only doing 4.5 knots, we have always gone with the thought that trawling speed was 6 knots Ð we are rethinking our whole fishing plans at this point! It was soon after this that the wind speed picked up and we packed the fishing stick away as we had other things to keep us occupied like trying to control the boat speed and adjusting the sails. The rest of the evening and the entire night was like Mr Toad's wild ride. At one point the wind got up to 23 knots and we were hurtling along, heeled over with water rushing down the gunwales and making moving around the boat an impossible task. The jib got furled away at some point during the night as the crashing through the waves was leaving us both unable to sleep, try as we might. It
finally settled down to a steady 17 knots early this morning and we were happy to sail along at the 5 Ð 6 knots that we were now comfortably doing even if we are looking at the world from a tilted angle. We have managed to catch up with a bit of sleep and even risked life and limb in the shower (which was luke-warm as we hadn't had the engine running). I even baked some muffins for breakfast after an epic struggle to stay up right whilst mixing them up. We are trying to take it easy today and not add any more bruises or aches and pains to our ever growing collections. We managed to cover 126NM in the 24 hours and only 2 hours' worth of that was using the engine, so from a sailing point of view things are looking better, pity about the sleep angle! At least we are one day closer to Nuku Hiva!