If I had to give every one of our days here
on board a meaningful title, I would have a really hard time picking one for
the day yesterday. “The day on which we lost our Genacker”, “The day on which
our fishing luck finally came back” and “The day on which we were all suddenly
wearing ridiculous beards” – any one of these titles would probably do. But,
first things first:
The day before yesterday we had for the
first time taken down all our “white sails” (Main sail, Mizzen sail, Genoa) and
instead put up our two coloured sails, the Genacker with our signature dolphin
as well as the smaller Mizzen Staysail. We found that this combination was in
fact quite good for the moderate trade winds that we had been receiving the
last couple of days and hence decided yesterday that we would like to continue
with this sail configuration. As we were pulling up the Genacker in the
morning, however, disaster struck: As the sail was almost fully up and caught
wind for the first time, we heard a loud ripping sound and saw the sail come
back down immediately, dropping into the water alongside the boat. After a brief
moment of shock we all hurried to quickly pull in the sail from the water – not
exactly an easy task considering that the Genacker is by far Thula’s largest sail
with a surface area of almost 240sqm (!). Upon closer inspection it turned out
that the sail had simply fallen victim to normal wear and tear (after all, the
sail was already 10 years old) and, luckily, not to any mistake on our side.
Still, from now on we would have to do without our beloved dolphin Genacker What a bummer! It goes without saying
that Jimmy instantly computed in his head the new adjusted ETA at St Lucia.
Fortunately, the mishap from the morning
did not spoil the atmosphere for the rest of the day. Quite the opposite was
the case, everyone was again greatly enjoying the awesome weather and wind
conditions and excitedly awaiting the under-1.000-mile-party in the afternoon. For
a change, I myself concentrated on optimizing our fishing technique. To maximise
the chances of finally landing another fish, I had put out two lines that day:
our usual rod and another, much more robust, hand line. This was not a
particularly smart idea as it seemed, since we were at that time crossing an
area with a lot of seaweed floating on the surface. The weed got entangled in
my two hooks again and again, every time resulting in the reel going off and me
jumping up and pacing across the boat. Shortly after Lunch (South African fish
curry and Salade Nicoise!), however, tables finally turned. The plates were
just being taken down into the galley when the reel again started to go crazy –
but this time for real! As I was starting to pull in our quarry I was getting
worried that my line might get entangled with the other line that was still
out. To avoid this, I asked Jimmy to quickly pull in the hand line for me. From
then on it was all very confusing. While I myself started to fear that my fish
was in fact again a huge patch of seaweed, Jimmy all of a sudden noted dryly
that he might in fact have a fish on his
line. As he pulled in the line even further and came to the conclusion that he
must also have caught a piece of weed I was in turn regaining confidence that
there might be a fish on my line
after all. At some point of time we even briefly considered the possibility
that we had both hooked the very same fish. In the end, it turned out that we
had both caught a fish each: I had a
fantastic 10 kg yellow fin tuna and Jimmy had a… a…. a…. well, what is that,
Jimmy!? Jimmy had landed a fish none of us had seen before. It looked a bit
like the combination of a common carp, a brass and some kind of grouper. Not
even the study of our (admittedly rather scarce) literature was able to shed
light on the mystery of the species that Jimmy had skilfully caught with his
hand line. In any case, the fish looked absolutely delicious and was – after a
small discussion (Liesel: “But what about ciguatera!?”) – taken down into the
galley, as well. In the evening, we were finally
able to enjoy our long hoped for tuna sashimi (with the full works of course) as
well as the mysterious Jimmyfish. The Jimmyfish turned out to be incredibly
delicious with a nice and tasty white meat and very few fish bones. We are
still waiting for any side effects to kick in. So far, however, all is well and
we are hoping that Jimmy lands another one of these Jimmyfishes anytime soon.
In the late afternoon/evening we finally
passed the 1,000 miles post. To honour this historic moment, we all did our
very best to dress up particularly nicely, groomed and trimmed our by now quite
impressive beards and summoned in the cockpit for drinks (and even cigars). Initially,
we were again generously allocated one bottle of beer each. After some
persuasion and sweet-talking we were able, however, to secure ourselves even a
second beer per person (where have we only gotten to?!). As you can imagine,
the party subsequently went wild – some of us didn’t even make it back to their
beds. Having already had a deal-closing party, a Bergfest and the
under-1,000-mile-party we are currently trying to come up with more occasions
for similar parties. The hottest contestants so far are St. Nicholas (which
already happens to be today but…oh well!) and possibly a full-moon party.
Happy St Nicholas from the Thula,
Jakob