Day 19 – Thursday 23 January.
By Grant Chapman.
Frustratingly low winds again and only managed 120 miles for the day – we needed 150 miles each day and every day we dropped miles we would battle to make them up again. There was much cursing of both Poseidon and Neptune, making sure that both the Greek and Roman mythological Gods understood our sentiments.
Our daily position report put us bunched together in our class so all of us had taken much the same route. Rotary Scout was at the back of this particular fleet but being a slower boat on handicap we were holding our own and coming 3rd in our division, 1st in our class (cruising) and 12th overall out of 25 boats.
The reel on the big fishing rod screamed suddenly as something very big took the lure. Grant leaped to his rod and said we needed to let this one run for a while as we had lots of line and it was clearly a big fish, however Marcus grabbed the brake on the reel and engaged tension to the point that the reel stopped spinning and the line broke. Marcus said a big marlin broke the surface 50 yards off our stern and leapt into the air – which although Grant couldn’t make out what fish it was he saw it hit the water after an aerial display. Marcus couldn’t apologize enough as he realized with chagrin the error of his ways with everyone on the boat mocking him mercilessly for not following instructions. The swivel on the line had been broken clean in half by this big fish and Grant commented that it was unlikely we would have landed it on Rotary Scout with us now barreling along at 6-7 knots but a longer fight would have been fun. The fixed line on the bungee attached to the stern cleat had also had its lure bitten clean off – this one was on a 100lb line. Virgil said that it seemed cruel that there were now quite a few fish roaming the seas with a nasty lure in its mouth but we all agreed that as the lures all had mild steel hooks they would rust away very quickly in such saline conditions. Just sitting in the tackle boxes the lures were already rusting away from the sea air. Those of us who had fished before also said that it’s not like you ever catch fish with another lure in their mouths already to which others argued that the fish weren’t that stupid and were “once hooked twice shy” to borrow from another phrase. Another opinion was that the hooked fish perished but such a notion didn’t garner much support.
We saw our first sea bird in ages at dusk – a lone tern that we couldn’t identify using our southern African bird lists. For supper we had tinned chilli pilchards and rice with extra milk mixed in for the wusses among us who found the chilli a little too cheeky for their delicate constitutions. An overcast night meant no star gazing this evening. The moon was rising later each day, her length of day and year exactly the same at 27.3 earth days, meaning she would rise later each day by approximately and hour and a half, together with the tides she produces, plus the extra 10 minutes or so for the two and half degrees of longitude that we were racking up each day in our journey west.