Current position "18:58.1N 39:19.8W”. A mix of all conditions in the last 24 hours but overall pretty good sailing. After yesterday’s disappointment with the spinnaker we realised we could fish more – as one of the reasons we couldn’t before was the inability to slow the boat down to pull a fish in when we were spinnaker sailing. Without it we are unencumbered. So it was fishing lines out and, sure enough, on Graham’s line [!! see earlier blogs for history of Graham versus Byron fishing lines] we hooked something. As Graham reeled in he thought we’d lost it, but then suddenly we saw the lure but behind it this beautiful blue streak. Attached you see a pic of Byron holding the Dorado up – and I can tell you it tastes fantastic (last night’s chicken dinner was demoted to tonight’s menu). If you look closely in this pic you’ll also see James still standing on the cockpit coaming – earlier the fish was flapping around on the deck and James was doing a great job trying to climb the sides of the boat to get away from it!

 

After that you can see what was one of a number of significant squalls coming up on us, James in this case – who you can also see is back to normal, excepting a residual dressing on his cheek. We chose to take the benefits of this with Graham realising he’d missed the daily shower on the stern so lathering up and using the squall rain instead. These squalls vary in strength, usually involving 25 knot winds, sometimes with very heavy rain, sometimes less – dependent on the squall size and how much we get hit full-on by it. At night it’s more spooky as it’s difficult to make out between a dark but benign cloud and a serious squall until it’s on top of you. Radar can help but, again, sometimes it doesn’t show up as a big blob of yellow rain until it is close.

 

Today we’ve had a great 1/2 way chat – accepting we’ve got some things working better than others (i.e. no spinnaker etc), but walking through all aspects of our day, from watches, sleep, food, provisions, water and power management, sails, how we manage riskier situations, and where we are on navigation. Some great new ideas have come out of these discussions, so we’re off now rigging a secondary gybe preventer, so we do not need to change the existing one over from one side to the other after each gybe – as a swinging main boom is among the deadliest risks we have to deal with. As usual Chris is a mind full of small observations which generate good conversation and new ideas.

 

On navigation, we’re aware we’re towards the top of the fleet in latitude, and that we’ve slipped back a bit. It’s tempting to relate these two to each other, but we can’t find a real logic for that. Nothing in the past, weather, current or future weather forecasts makes a more southerly position obviously beneficial (*) – the course we’re holding is essentially a direct line to St Lucia and already south of the 20N latitude that tends to assure good winds. More likely we feel, is we’ve lost time handling the mishaps we’ve had in the last few days, and are now constrained to a slightly lower boat speed. We’ve concluded we have good boat speed, which we’ve demonstrated up to the last couple of days, but also that our priority is to enjoy our second half of this trip. So when some of our competitor boats have made it into St Lucia and we have two days to go, do we get depressed we’re still out there, or commiserate with the fact that they are now stuck in harbour and we’re still enjoying Atlantic sailing!? The latter we think.

 

(*) There is a sub-tropical depression potentially developing above 20N but more to the west – we’ll keep an eye on this..