We had a lovely peaceful night anchored off Ronde Island (or Isle de Ronde depending on which chart you’re examining). We use our time yesterday afternoon to clean the barnacles off of Dignity’s hulls. Earlier in the afternoon I had jumped into the water for a swim and immediately noticed that she was covered in barnacles from her stay in Grenada so that set our afternoon’s activities.
This time, the muck underneath the boat contained hundreds of tiny soft shelled critters, a little like marine fleas, which having been disturbed from their home settled on me. When I left the water on a couple of occasions I could feel them crawling all over me – it was horrible. The last hour or so was spent on the hookah. I didn’t come out until I have rubbed as many of the critters off me as possible. While doing this I was surrounded by fish eating the critters as I washed them off. Even so, I still had many aboard when I climbed out the water. Yuch.
We left around 9am this morning putting out the fishing lines as quickly as possible. Within minutes we had a fish on a line but just as we were dealing with it we sailed into the lee of Kick ’em Jenny and the wind went wild. By the time we had dealt with the boat we had lost the fish but not before the line had tangled with one of the others.
The sailing was soon fine and having managed to untangle the lines we were hopeful of catching something with all four of the lines out. Soon we had attracted the attention of a number of frigate birds. In the past interest would soon disappear when the birds realized our lures were fake. This time, one was too eager and dived down and was hooked. It was sad realizing the bird was doomed one way or the other. For a while it flew while being towed. Soon it landed in the water and was dragged. I decided to see if it was possible to haul it aboard and remove the hook before it drowned. By the time I had it close to the boat and out of the water it was not in a happy state. The hook was in it’s body, a wing looked broken from being dragged in the water and it was not happy at all.
At this point I realized I would have preferred it had the bird drowned. As it was I couldn’t put it back in the water to drown nor could I bring myself to bring it aboard. So I removed the lure and let the bird have some peace in the water before the inevitable came. We did capture a few pics of the birds before and after the hookup. Suggest you don’t look if you’re squeamish.
The remained of the sail to Carriacou was less eventful. We have discovered another tear in the headsail further up than the previous one. We’re going to go ashore this afternoon and see how our dinghy cover is doing and see if we can have a professional look at the sail.