Polliwogs no more…and a whopper sailfish!
We finally have WiFi again, so I’m belatedly posting a few blogs I wrote during our passage…
We passed the equator!
We enjoyed great wind speed and direction for the first half of our trip from Noronha to Grenada, logging nearly 5 days of 200+ miles. It was fun seeing Catalyst in her element, at times reaching 20 knots as she cut smoothly through the water and rode the 2-3 meter swells.
We did encounter the inevitable sailing mishaps, of course, with two episodes of the headsail wrapping around the forestay – once in the middle of the night. It took some innovative thinking and maneuvering by Pete and Dunbar (with Dave and me taking action as dictated) to rectify the situation. Luckily, our hardy spinnaker remained intact, and we learned some valuable lessons. (As my friend Rusty commented on these type of setbacks: “You know something will go awry, you just don’t know what!”)
We passed the equator on day four. To commemorate the milestone, we lowered the sails for an ocean dip, after being anointed as shellbacks by Neptune, aka Captain Dunbar (according to seafaring tradition, you graduate from a polliwog to a shellback once you cross the equator).
Near the end of this already epic day, Pete caught an ~80 lb sailfish (looks like a marlin), after losing something even bigger earlier in the day that snapped his fishing line like a piece of thread! The four of us set to work processing this huge fish -- inevitably, it seems, fish strike right as we’re about to sit down for dinner! -- before continuing our shellback celebration with a bottle of champagne, kudu pate, and post-dinner chocolate cake with ice cream. (Yes, I said ice cream! I made it from whipping up a UHT carton of ice cream mix – it’s a South African product that Dunbar’s friend Michelle recommended, and it's quite good!)
We retired for the evening as full-fledged shellbacks, looking forward to putting Noronho’s fresh limes, cilantro, onions, and peppers to use in tomorrow’s sailfish ceviche!
