Day 10

I know from bitter experience that for almost all readers of this blog, a list of wind speeds, sea states, boat speed and direction, would read insufferably dull, however for us out here it is the daily headlines, the big news. It rules our lives, we live and breathe it. And really, not all that much else happens! A couple of days ago we went at half speed (note, no numbers there!) for half a day, and were feeling a little piqued, when listening in to the HF radio we found boats behind and above us had zero wind, and the one behind was lolling in three metre seas and had broken a steering chain! Meanwhile, below a few hundred miles they were complaining of too much wind and complete cloud cover, 24 hours of rain. So our half speed in bright sun suddenly seemed idyllic. Since then we've had wonderful wind and speed, almost as fast as the boat can go (numbers skillfully avoided again!), some very grey days and now it's sunny. Flying fish are omnipresent and we've been eating a few.
Marcel and I are both reading Tolstoy, well I'm actually being read to by a wonderful englishwoman on the ipod. Anna Karenina, it's a silly aristo-soap but extremely long which is just the thing for these ocean nights. There is not really much to look out for but we must in case. One of the sixteen yachts on our local HF radio net saw a ship the other night, it's so unusual we all heard about it! Marcel is reduced to Tolstoy as it's the last book in Ellidas rather limited French Library. He even read "L'Electricite a bord" from cover to cover but now it's down to "Des Grandes Poissons e Des Hommes" by Sasha Tolstoy. It's a solid hard cover brimming with photographs of the smiling Sasha with his smiling friends and their smiling wine-guts standing under the corpses of the biggest fish that once swam in the ocean. There is no chapter on cooking techniques or tips for cleaning and preserving. I think it's appalling. For me fishing is harvesting and those who treat it as blood sport should be thrown to the lions. Imagine if they were hunting the biggest tree? What-ho, there's a large on Jean-Paul! Looks bigger than Claude's of 08? Do you think the Pioneer or the Stihl? Have the boy bring the Pioneer, I think we'll have a world record. Crash. Tape measure!
We have actually had some fish excitement, or rather no-fish excitement. Our crash lines consist of a solid lure with a solid hook of 3mm steel, some 300lb mono and a shock absorber. A few weeks back something broke half of one of those hooks off and yesterday something snapped the 300lb mono, so there are big things out there! It would be a terrible nuisance if we actually had to deal with one, just getting one off the hook and away is pretty risky, so a shame to lose gear but probably for the best.