Thursday  January 23rd,  2014

St Helena, South Atlantic Ocean, 15 55.5S 05 48.5E 

Today's Blog by David (Time zone UTC +1.0)

We are now safely tied up in St Helena. Our passage of 1,695 miles was completed in a little over nine days – and average of 183 miles made good each day. We flew the Frog for five days including a continuous period of two and a half days. In short – an excellent sail.

Visiting the town of Jamestown feels like stepping back in time to the first half of the nineteenth century.  The architecture is uniformly from that period – the road quite wide – it oozes history; you can easily imagine soldiers and sailors in colourful uniforms strutting around  or riding on horseback through this historic place.

Fishing Report

We continued to trail two lines behind.  Suddenly, we had fish attached to both of them.  David quickly lost the one off the rod but Richard persevered with then hand line, bringing in an undernourished – at least, not yet fully developed – Dorado which I was all for giving a reprieve.

Richard however, had his eye on a sushi starter for lunch and insisted that we ‘boated’ it. I held it firmly while Richard went below for a knife and a chopping board with which poor Doris was speedily decapitated. Rather than gutting it down below in the Galley, since the afterdeck already resembled an abbatoir on a bad afternoon,  it was decided to deal with  Doris there and then. Readers may recall that Richard an I had attended a knife skills course at Billingsgate a while ago and he was keen to show off his skills and proceeded expertly to  gut her. What the course did not prepare either of us  for was the fact that  - despite having been being headless for fully three minutes, and having its belly wide open, there was still some life in the old dog; as Richard changed his grip Doris had a post mortem twitch – one so violent that not only did Richard lose hold, but Doris flounced off the deck onto the sugar scoop and then bounced into the sea behind us…….  Sushi for someone’s lunch maybe – but not ours!

Rudi followed this up later in the day with another bite and was completely spooled – the line breaking at the reel – and we arrived instead in St Helena without having eaten a fish that we have caught since we left Australia.

Diving Report

We arrived in St Helena to be regaled by reports of up to 12 Whale Sharks having been cruising around the anchorage the day before. These are huge beasts – up to 20 metres long which eat only plankton.  Sadly, though  the display was over by the time we arrived.

We arranged to go scuba diving yesterday. It proved to be one of the better dives we have done; although the bottom was volcanic sand  - (quite recent so not much coral) there were as many fish as we had seen for some time. Thoroughly enjoyed it even though the visibility was not as good as one might have hoped for.

Pretty much as soon as we were back in the anchorage w group of whale sharks were spotted some way off and we got into the dinghy to chase after them. They truly are majestic creatures. This one – which I would estimate at about 15 metres – came  over to the dinghy and invited us into the water to play:

Once in the water, the visibility wasn’t good so looking from the head front you couldn’t see the tail! As it passed, a large number of different kinds of fish were evident swimming along with it or perhaps attached to its surface……

Including this pair (Rudi and Dannie) attached to its fin – the Whaleshark continuing to swim on  apparently unperturbed by these uninvited hitchhikers. .

One or more of these passengers was probably a remora!