12:22N 72:17W

 

Well we don’t actually know what she/he was called....but it was the biggest fish we’ve landed on Bandit to date.....a huge mahimahi.  And A Fish Called Wanda keeps our movie themes ticking along so Wanda it is!  By the way – wasn’t John Cleese hilarious in that?  Even better than Basil Fawlty.  It was too dark (and too rolly) for fish photos but David did run the tape measure over it and it was 1.15 metres or 45 inches long. 

 

Until the fish arrived we had a fairly uneventful day yesterday with lots of ships, mostly oil tankers and bulk carriers heading from Venezuela to Aruba and Curacao.  Sailing was good but the fishing was lousy...until sunset which, as any good fisherman knows, is the best time to fish anyway.  And of course the strike came not only in the middle of dinner, but in the middle of a VHF call from Balvenie.  Mark got dumped on the chart table (well the VHF receiver did) as David flew up the stairs with me dealing with the half eaten dinner.  The mahimahi had taken the entire line and jammed the reel and, as it was a biggie, it took some time to land.  First we had to furl the sails (we had twin headsails out) then put the engine in reverse and wind the line slowly in by hand.  Mahimahi put up quite a fight and it’s always a shame to see these beautiful electric blue fish landed.  But we have to eat and there seem to be plenty of them out there.  A quick slug of gin into its gills (and I could only find Bombay Sapphire.....it was either that or single malt)...and it was all over for Wanda, who is now in our fridge and will do us for at least six meals. 

 

By the time we’d dealt with the fish and the aftermath and got the sails back up it was dark but it wasn’t long until the moon came up and stayed with us all night.  The wind eased considerably so we had a very slow night.....down to three knots at times.  We thought about a sail change but opted to leave it until daylight.  After breakfast we furled the headsails to put up the main, so our speed is back up to six knots with around 20 knots of wind and still a kind, flattish sea.  We are pushing a bit of a current unlike yesterday when we had a favourable one of a up to a knot.  We’d been very nervous about this notorious stretch of water which is one of the world’s worst apparently.  Fellow Kiwis Cutty Hunk and Awaroa got a hammering around here – 48 knots of wind and four metre swells.  The area gets the full force of the Atlantic/Caribbean trade winds as they run out of room and as the sea floor shelves up, the seas tend to build.  Sailing guru Jimmy Cornell advises waiting for a good weather window in Aruba and also suggests April and May are the most reliable times to go.  We had the luxury of time which Cutty Hunk and Awaroa didn’t – they needed to get to the Panama Canal.  So far we’ve been lucky and hope it continues all the way to Santa Marta.  At this speed we should be there tomorrow morning (Easter Saturday).

 

Balvenie is sitting just off our port stern.....we’ve been about a mile apart all night and looks like we’ll maintain the same distance all the way to Santa Marta.  Nice to have company in foreign waters.