22.00 UTC (Zulu), Noon by Tahiti Time
Position / Posicao: 13.32.79 S (sul), 146.39.53 W (oeste)
Course / Rumo (COG): 85 degrees magnetic (85 graus magneticos) Speed / Velocidade (SOG, GPS): averaging 4.0 to 4.5 knots (nos)
Wind: E, backing slowly to NNE, @ about 8 kts. very light. squalls almost down to zero.
Swell: with decreased wind, decreased swell and waves. 🙂 the current is still there, but weaker (apparently).
Temp: Today the changing weather has been pretty obvious – trades dying out, disrupted by other forces, Highs and Lows, in the greater area – all sorts of cloud patterns not normally seen with trade wind conditions – a nice change! Water temp: 31.2 C
Barometric Pressure (BP): 1009 mb (slight drop today)
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So, here’s the ol noonsite post, posted after midnight! Sorry about that. We were busy today, doing a great deal of not too much. Overnight the weather started to change and by mid-morning the trades had started to die out. We turned the Yanmar back on and started to make more easting in earnest. We’ve been motorsailing all day long, with the main in the second reef and with the staysail open. No use in opening the genoa, as we’re quite close to the wind, closer than that sail like to set when going to weather. It’s not super fast progress, as you might see if SPOT is actually working (is it?), but we’re comfortable and we’re in economical mode on the diesel – so we’re just happy to be headed EAST. I guess we’ve got about 400+ miles to Ua Po, our planned landfall.
The highlights today have been: fresh homemade bread, and I have to say that Lara has outdone herself this time! The best loaves to come from our oven yet! It was so yummy, and the anticipation so great that the three of us devoured the first loaf, with butter of course, in a matter of mintues – faster than you could reef your mainsail with a squall coming on! Oh, and we took advantage of the engine being on (charging power) to actually drop the TV down and watch a movie in the middle of the afternoon. Danny had never seen Ridley Scott’s ‘Thelma & Louise’, which I believe is brilliant, and so we enjoyed that. The only other event of the day really was seeing two ships, one large fishing vessel, apparently Chinese, and one smaller, trawler-like boat that crossed our bow not two miles off after converging on our course for hours. It was a coincidence. Oh, and I fixed the loose wire conduit inside the mast – again. The prior temporary fix, done together with Tim (Friendship) in Fatu Hiva – back in August – had broken overnight and so we’d suffered quite a number of hours with that damn alu pipe banging around inside the mast. Certainly one of the boat noises I least enjoy. Anyway, it reminded me of Tim and the goodship Friendship, and I wished I could find the coat hanger he gave me on that occasion – it would have made the task at the mast easier today! Can you believe we don’t have a single wire coat hanger????? Oh well – the permanent fix job on that can only be done when we eventually take the mast out of the boat for this or that reason. That might not happen for a very long while yet.
I promised some fishing news. We’ll, here’s a summary. On the day we sailed out of Moorea – last Monday I do believe – I made up a new homemade lure. Nothing ‘new’ in terms of colors or style or whatever, just a fresh lure, similar to the ones we’ve been making these last months… copies of the lures that Niklas makes on Espumeru. I use a treble hook, fairly large, and then decorate it with colorful plastic wrappers, usually from things like Oreo cookies and such. I prefer the blues, silvers and pinks, as the fish seem to as well. Anyway, you do your best to tie a mop of this stuff on near the eye of the hook, arrange your streamers of Oreo and other wrapper like a Tahitian grass skirt around the treble, and then tie the whole thing up with a heavy duty stainless steel wire leader – right now I’ve been using some strong stuff, like 275 pound test. Tie all that off to a swivel on a heavy-test handline and trail it from the boat… here’s what you get:
– Monday afternoon, when pulling the line in, we found there was a rather large gill plate/jaw attached to the hook, and the heavy leader wire was bent through a curving arc of about 90 degrees. This gill plate was more than 8 inches long, and so we guessed it had been ripped from the mouth of a pretty good size mahi mahi (judging from the shape). Essentially, the guy sacrificied part of his jaw/gills to get loose, and in the quick sail upwind, beating, we never even noticed the action in the water. Lara and I had already had this experience before. Oh well, first lost fish.
– Tuesday, late morning. Fish On! This time something long and skinny. When we finally got it to the boat, it appeared to be a juvenile sailfish or some other billed gamefish. It was difficult to say, as we don’t see many of those anyway. One reference we have, with drawings, suggests that perhaps it was a longbill spearfish, or a white marlin. And it was pretty, very shiny and brilliant. But it was unmistakably a young one, even it if was about 4 feet long, and so I decided we should release it and let him go to grow and fight another day. I think Danny was disappointed about that, or even miffed, but he hid his disapproval pretty well.
– Wednesday afternoon: Fish on again. This time, a keeper! To be perfectly honest, we don’t know what it was. It looked to be a cross between a barracuda, a king mackerel and a wahoo. There will be a photo posted when we have the chance to do that. I wondered if it might have been a ‘dogtooth tuna’ that I’d heard the Polynesians talking about. Anwyway, Danny cleaned him and we stored the fillets in the fridge until Thursday. Lara fried them up with a simple recipe we had from the Galapagos and they were a yummy welcome to the anchorage in Rangiroa.
– Saturday afernoon: Sailing just north of and after leaving Rangiroa, we happened across a large group of birds, quite obviously feeding on baitfish in the water. This usually happens when someone else, like a predator fish, is feeding from below. The ball of baitfish is forced near the surface and most of them are eventually breakfast for someone, bird or fish. Anyway, we hooked one of these fish – I believe it was a tuna of modest but respectable size. But he got off the hook as I was winding in the line on the handline. 😦
– Sunday, late morning: Something absolutely monstrous hits the line. Marlin? Shark? 1500 pound yellowfin? Who knows. But it was far too much fish for our gear. The line slammed taught as if it’d been attached to a boat going the opposite direction at twice the speed. But we didn’t managed to get the line off the cleat, much less begin any kind of a fight when the mystery monster had escaped. When we did get the line in, we saw that he’d pretty much put an end to my lure… the plastic head had been pushed and squeezed down on the shank of the hook (in a way that I wouldn’t be able to do even if I wanted to, with pliers), and all three barbed hooks had been bent outward past 90 degrees. Amazing. Somebody got away, but with a very sore mouth. At least I know my knots are still good (Yes Bay style) and the SS leader strong enough. But now it’s time to make a new lure!
That’s about it gang. Lara has just gone off watch, from 8PM to midnight. I’m on from midnight to 0400, what JP called the ‘dogwatch’ I believe, and then Dan the man is on from 0400 to 0800, or the sunrise watch. All’s calm and well aboard, and we’re steaming east while the trades are weak. Hope you guys are having a good one. ciao.
S/Y Walk On 