The flying fish have collectively recognized the futility of their daytime suicide runs and have switched to en masse night sortes. At dawn I collected 20 of the buggers, big ones, from around the boat. Overnight we had a few rough broadsides and after each I could hear the rascals flapping around above our cabin. Grrrrr.<\/p>\n

The one departure from normal was sighting a nearby fishing vessel. In it’s vicinity we came quite close to what looked like a floating radio beacon. I was concerned it may be one of many and we were about to run into a net but fortunately we had none of that. For a while the fishing boat turned and came straight at us but that ended up being part of some broader maneuvering.<\/p>\n

We’ve been in email contact with Bristol Rose who are a few days behind us. Their current plans are to make landfall in Hiva Oa which could be around the time we’ll be there. We didn’t hook up in the Galapagos so perhaps we’ll rendezvous soon. We’ve also been hearing from Steve & Trish on Curious who are a few weeks ahead of us and have got quite excited by what they have reported.<\/p>\n

The winds continue to come out of the East. With the motion over the swell (up to 10-12 feet at times) we can usually go no further than 125 degrees apparent (about 140 true) down wind before the main sail starts covering the headsail part of the time. We’re now off course by about 17 degrees which is not desirable. I’m going to try wing on wing for a while (headsail and mainsail out on opposite sides of the boat) today. We’ll need to be cautious about this and rig preventers to prevent an accidental jibe. I would rather have a favourable wind shift though.<\/p>\n

Some of the boats in the group behind us have opted to stay north of 5S for a while which, in hindsight, would have been a lot better for us. We’d have kept the 1 to 1.5 knot current for a few extra days and had a better desired heading through these easterlies. Based on our recent average boat speed our ETA is May 1 but I’m sticking to May 2 as we’ll have to add distance to cover for our bad heading.<\/p>\n

We’ve been inattentive with our fishing recently. Over the last few days we’ve lost about 3 lures and one hook. They don’t just fall off. I reckon we’ve either hooked big beasties that managed to snap the 200lb line above the leader or were regular fish that were eaten in turn by sharks. Who knows but if we’re going to fish we’ll have to do it when we’re prepared to watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The flying fish have collectively recognized the futility of their daytime suicide runs and have switched to en masse night sortes. At dawn I collected 20 of the buggers, big ones, from around the boat. Overnight we had a few rough broadsides and after each I could hear the rascals flapping around above our cabin. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-sea","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3337,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2814\/revisions\/3337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}