21 April 2011, 9pm (Jon)
One hour into a 3 hour watch, I have spent the first hour watching the stars, and a moon-rise which could have been mistaken for a sunrise coming from below the horizon. Under full sail comfortably at 8 - 10 knots over the past 4 hours, sea slight, reaching in 20 knots true. Balanced rudder - the autopilot doing almost no work. Magic stuff.
A beautiful day to be on the water after some motoring through last night. The day started well with all on board having breakfast, Sharon is back on deck and smiling. The boys are great fun, we had puppet shows from Mees today, crazy dancing from Kent to Abba's Super Trouper - quite entertaining to have 4 kids dancing in 2 square meters with the boat heeling over and pushing through waves. Needless to say, the four of them are at full strength now. I think Pieter is the only one who has not been seasick at all.
Highlight of the day was soon after lunch, the boys had been in bed for about 4 minutes when the fishing rod starting singing. To shouts of 'fish, fish!'we had the boys out of bed to be entertained by the fight. Adam went into game fishing mode, Sharon and Leonie being responsible for crowd control and filming, we started to depower the yacht, slowing from 6.5knots to 1.5, furling the genoa, heading east across the wind, engine on and idling to maintain steerage. A 15kg Mahi mahi became firstly sashimi with wasabi and soy sauce, with a 2006 Reisling, then a little bit more of it landed in the pan for dinner. The fillets were as long as the aft lockers - 85cm. Good fun. There were two downsides, one, forgetting to switch off the fuel pump - overflowing the day tank and putting a few litres into the Pacific- thankfully just after the fish had been landed. My fault. The other was 'the fish' standing on a washing-up bucket in all the excitement of a big fish in a small space.
Black team points: +2 for catching, filleting, cleaning and cooking dinner, -1 point for Adam slicing a hole in his finger and retiring from filleting. (Leonie probably just found out about the smashed washing-up container reading this during her watch. Lose another point…). (L: ?!?!!?) It is properly fantastic being out here, what is there not to love? Fresh and clean. It reminds me of that crispy clean air above the clouds on a ski field. We had showers today on the transom , buckets of salt water tipped over, then a rinse off in fresh. We all smell better, except Leonie, she's showering tomorrow (L: I'm just waiting for the temperature to rise a bit more…).
20 mins ago we passed 30 degrees latitude, the sea is still 23.7 degrees but had been up to 24.5 today. Here the water is 4300m deep.
English word for the day: Mint. As in, ''what a mint day", ''what a mint fish", "mint sailing conditions"
Adam's attempt: "Leonie is my mintie"
Let the good times roll
