24^th June 2016 Brown footed shearwaters and yellow fin tuna.

Who says the oceans are just a mass of grey blue colour variations, the birds and fish come up with some lovely surprises.

A couple of days ago this plump brown bird sits itself comfortably on the water right beside us as would aunty on the settee as we watch Children’s TV. It then proceeds to study us as we move past, I wondered if Zoonie had her slip showing or something. It turns out it was a brown footed shearwater, as distinguished from a flesh footed shearwater, (I couldn’t see its feet at the time) by its range, all over the South Pacific from its nesting sites on New Zealand and Australia.

We sit in the cockpit for long periods of time trying to take it all in, enough to remember after it’s all over in two weeks’ time anyway. The experience is a little like the Atlantic with occasional big rollers grown to a size a big ocean will allow. But it’s not quite as boisterous at the moment and long may that last.

We are on the cusp for flying the cruising chute and as the genoa alone is giving us around 6 knots and doesn’t have to be watched much of the time we are happy to pootle along at around 120 miles a day.

A squall passes through every now and then just to keep us on our toes!

Yesterday we were sitting in the saloon reading when the fishing line whirred out astern. A beautiful little yellow fin tuna became our supper for the next two days. Funnily in the morning I said to Rob, “We shall have egg, chips and beans for supper tonight, although that could become fish and chips if we’re lucky.”

In the end I gently fried some pine nuts, sliced spring onion and grated white cabbage in sesame oil, put it aside and put balsamic vinegar, sesame oil and soy sauce in the warm pan to give a rich brown glaze and rapidly fried a tuna fillet in the liquid while some Chinese noodles were boiling in the pan alongside. It was tasty!

Tonight we will have fish and chips!

We are well past the third of the way mark now and I’m wondering if we are still part of the EU or standing independent again.