I left off the last blog with we’re still motoring. Well, we continue to motor. Steve appeared in the companionway saying he caught a fish. It was a flying fish of which several littered our deck. He threw this one and several others overboard.
In the days ahead, Steve did catch a fish. I was napping when you could hear the line run out. I jumped out of bed and went above to see what was going on.
I stopped the blog here because I’m on watch now and I need to look around. I’m astonished to see yet another rainbow! I think the Atlantic Ocean has more rainbows than Hawaii!
Our watch schedule is as follows. Starting at 9 pm, I go on watch from 9-12 am. Steve relieves me at midnight and his watch is 12 am to 3 am. Then Jeff relieves him until 6 am. During the day, I do 6-8:30 am, Steve does 8:30 am to 11 am. Jeff comes on again from 11 am- 1:30 pm. Then I do 1:30 pm to 4 pm, Steve does 4-6:30 pm and Jeff does the last day watch until 9 pm, when I come on again. On watch means that you make sure the boat is okay and you’re not going to hit anything. We have a chart plotter that tells us when other boats are in the area. During my night watches, I’ve been listening to audiobooks. However, I’ve listened to all I’ve downloaded and since I don’t have internet now, I can’t download more. Oh well…
Back to the fish story. Steve got the fish very close to the boat and let it swim to tire itself out. Then he asked Jeff for the gaff to bring the fish up onto the deck. When he started pulling it out of the water, I could see it was a blue marlin perhaps four feet long. When Jeff tried to hand Steve the gaff, a gust of wind rocked the boat and we lost the gaff overboard. We forgot the fish and steered back to where the gaff was floating in the water. Jeff snagged it with a net while I hung onto his shorts to be sure he didn’t end up overboard. They say on any long sail you have to do a man overboard drill. I guess we accomplished that task by retrieving the gaff!
Was the fish still on the line? Yes, it was. We pulled it on deck and Steve showed Jeff how to retrieve the hook and fillet it. For lunch we have blue marlin and mango salsa. We have many more filets for both lunch and dinner. I shouldn’t have bought frozen fish at Trader Joe’s! Here’s a link to the video of our blue marlin adventure and after, our lunch:
