Thursday 29 January

 

Everyone saw flying fishes except me.  I was an object of pity.  People kept saying "Look - there's one", my neck swivelled like a CCTV camera but all I saw was sea. "You must have seen it, it was huge.”   But no.   I started to doubt their existence.  Flying fishes, indeed!

 

But I persevered and kept clocking the sea.  Reward - I eventually saw one.  Then another.  Now I see them all the time.  Most don’t fly in straight lines.  The do corners.  Quite sharp ones, like at Indianapolis. 

 

Ben D lives in Indonesia and says that the flying fishes there fly in straight lines.  Doing corners is smarter.  The big nasty fish below might expect the prey to flop back from the same trajectory.  Splashing in somewhere else improves the chance of survival.  Are Atlantic flying fishes more evolved than those in SE Asia?

 

If we think we have it tough out here we can think about the Mini Transat sailors.  These are tiny 21 foot single-handed boats that go across every year.  They race from Brittany to the W Indies, via Lanzarote.   The boats are effectively surfboards with a tiny hutch for the nutter who sails it.  They can do 25 knots.  The sailor lives on ibuprofen and rations.  A long lie-in is 15 minutes kip wedged in place.   The sailor is wet through and might wear the same manky kit for days on end.   These people are barking.  Apparently there is a waiting list for every race.

 

 

The two senior members of our crew.   Glenn is on the eBay satphone; Gregor is looking vacuously out to sea.  (The thing round Glenn’s head is not because he has been doing dentistry or thoracic surgery – it is a head torch for doing stuff at night or down in the bilges)