Flight Plan

Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Wed 14 Apr 2010 09:40
April 14th 0210 Local 0910 UTC       
 
07:57.28S 120:32.46W
 
We are now struggling to keep our course and the wind's continuing tendency to (from) the East is driving us down south of our course line. If this persists till morning we will change our sail plan. It seems a shame to do it as we have been on the one tack for 1900 miles (I have just crossed the 1100 miles to go mark!) and for over one week!
 
1100 miles took us 5 days flat on the first part of the passage, but we are certain we cannot replicate that. In fact we only have a downside to our remaining passage time as we cannot possibly improve our speeds up to now. But in management speak we are doing our best to "manage the downside risk".
 
Before embarking on this adventure big game fishing always was of interest to me but I had only tried it once. That was very expensive and in New Zealand and we never caught anything for the whole day. Now, I know I have bored you with the stories of the ones that got away, but yesterday again we had a half hour wrestling match with a big marlin of some type. OK, OK we have not landed any of these yet but in fact our experience initially was not up to it which is a little like the gear we are using for it. However when we stopped and thought about it after yesterdays battle, we realised that in the last week we have had 5 full blown battles with marlin / swordfish/ sailfish where we have seen the fish jumping and thrashing out of the water in spectacular style. These fish have ranged between 4 foot long and 7 foot long. That is just the fish we have seen, there have also been many aggressive strikes where we didn't see the fish so can't confidently report what they were. The mind boggles as to how many of these fish are out there when we have had so many encounters. I estimate the numbers must be huge given that the whole length of our Pacific passage so far has been through a flying carpet of flying fish. Something has to eat them and good luck to them. The flying fish are driving us mad. Last night almost 50 of them rained down on us including one right down our hatch and into our bed - our bed for goodness sake!  
 
Our daily SSB contact is now starting to fade in reception quality as we have now put over 400 miles between us and some boats which started almost 50 miles ahead of us. Nika however who started a couple of days after us, though 50 miles ahead of us (from San Christobal) is about 550 miles behind us and we are unable to shake him off. They seem to be sailing a blinder - good luck to them they are a great crew and we look forward to them catching us up. On one of our morning SSB net sessions Nika enquired what was Rhiann Maries "flight plan" today. We like that!   
 
Back to fishing. Although we have told you of the big ones that got away we have of course caught plenty fish to eat. We had a back log for a few days though and we had to eat up what we had so we ran our stocks right down. So confident were we of catching another fish for dinner yesterday Trish did not bother bringing anything out of the freezer and so it was that last night we enjoyed - omlettes for dinner and very nice too!