Date: Friday, September 28th 2018 Time: 17:00 UTC Location: 14°03.14′ S, 159°47.75′ W COG 283° T SOG: 5.7 kts Distance to the Suwarrow: 201 nm 24hr Distance covered: 140 nm
Cameron here. Yesterday afternoon our fishing dry steak came to an end. I was down stairs doing dishes when I heard that sweet scream of our big Penn Senator 6/0 reel. Before the girls could jump up from their books and sewing projects off went the second reel. We had a double hook up and all I could think was Tuna, the schooling fish of the deep blue. The last time we had a double hook up was in the Marquesas and we got completely “spooled” on one reel (which means the fish ran all the line off the reel and kept on going). The fish in the Marquesas in particular can be huge and we lost a lot of gear this season. We fought both fish hard, Isa on the small reel and Adelaide on the big one. Luckily the one on the small reel got off as we can only eat so much fish and our freezer is currently pretty full as we won’t see a store for potentially 30 days. Adelaide continued to reel and we eventually landed a good 25lb Big Eyed Tuna that was about 2′ long. I’m guessing on the weight as our only scale is a luggage scale that funny enough I use to gauge the remaining propane in the propane tanks. I’ll bust it out on the next fish as I’m pretty curious.
The girls helped me clear the cockpit of all cushions so that we could make a huge mess. We don’t really have anywhere else to deal with a fish of that size. It’s always a bit of a science project as well. We talk about blood coagulation, how the gills work and how they differ on different fish. We look at what they were eating and examine the different intestines in different states of breakdown. After an hour we were all cleaned up and now have about 8-10 meals of Tuna in the freezer.
All of this commotion in the cockpit was the last straw for our stalk of Bananas. When we bought it for $5 last Tuesday it had 165 small green bananas on it. We’ve had stalks that ripened all at once and others like this one that slowly ripened over the period of a week. As I flung this fish into the cockpit, I think I bumped the bimini and it rained bananas for a couple seconds. It was nice reminder of how bountiful this part of the world can be. I can see some Banana bread in our future.
We lost some more stitching in our genoa last night and it’s out of service for now. I noticed it at my dawn bow to stern inspection. Luckily the wind is now up and we’re moving well under double reefed main and staysail. We’ll have another stitching project the next time we find someone with a sailrite sewing machine… Our last sewing project on that sail in the Marquesas is holding well, it might be the strongest part of that old sail. This is SV Banyan, signing off