Monday 12th Feb:  The Inter Tropical Convergence Zone 01 05.6N 87 07W - Four days out from Panama.  

Today’s blog David

Serendipity is about 36 hours from the Galapagos Islands dodging the squalls through the doldrums. Progress has not been lightning fast; we have  light winds but we are making steady progress – so far – we haven’t been close to a thunder storm, either! However, all that looks like changing in the next 24 hours as we approach a “hole” – in other words a  depression with no wind, heavy rain and thunder at its centre tonight. Deepest joy!

Serendipity is quite a ‘tender’ boat for her size. That is tricky in stronger winds because we have to reef deeply and early as the wind picks up but in these light airs she is in her element.  Here we are now slipping along at 6.5 knots in 7.5 knots of true wind;  we have motored only 15. 3 hours in the last four days. My other yachts have been comparative carthorses and we would have been motoring for two or three times that time in earlier boats – or been 150 miles behind where we are;  the same choices as other yachts in this rally have had to make! 

As I said before, this is not a race but it is frankly hard not to in the circumstances.  We had a bad day Saturday in that we found it had to keep the boat going and so we lost ground to the leaders. Some of it we caught up yesterday but only because they reached the “hole”  before us.  We are presently lying about 7^th on corrected time but there is plenty of time to lose plenty of places!  Where we come out at the finish largely depends upon how we negotiate the hole tonight!

We have been fishing since we left Las Perlas – dragging a multi-coloured lure behind is. I have to say our ambitions have not been high – a tuna, dorado or wahoo would be more than ample but, perhaps because of  such low ambitions,  we have not caught a great deal since we left the UK. We attribute this partly because we don’t fish all the time and partly because the boat goes a little too fast.

We have however caught a couple of ‘sensible ‘sized Dorado.  By sensible, I mean big enough to be worth eating but small enough to land (or boat).    A couple of times in the Atlantic we were “spooled” -  by which I mean that we hooked something that was either too big or we were to slow to stop the line all unravelling. Either way, the upshot is that the fish got away and took a whole reel of line with it (and may well be dragging a two hundred meter necklace along with it today!)  In Panama, we bought new lures and more line and re-entered the fray. 

The first thing you know about a bite is that you hear the reel spinning as the line runs out – the faster the line goes, the higher pitched the noise --- and the bigger the fish. So on Saturday, we deployed the line early in the morning and within about 30 minutes the line was fair fizzing out. We got to the rod in time and applied the brake ………. and then, looking aft, a BLOODY GREAT SAILFISH jumped out of the water behind us – a big game fish with a long bill like a sword - three, perhaps four metres long!   

It was a classic,  spectacular sight – you will find photographs of it in any Big Game fishing web site.  The fish jumped and then ran when we gave it slack and then jumped as soon as we tried to restrain it. 

Now, at this point a number of things were running through our minds:

1                      There are at least 10 meals on this fish;  freezer is full; where will we put all the meat?

2                      Does anyone know how to land this fish?

3                      When we have, (i) will it bite; (ii) is the sword sharp and (ii) how will we kill it?  

4                      Does anyone know where the gaff is? 

5                      Errr…. ….are we REALLY going to try to land this?

Fortunately, we did not have to answer any of these questions because Sally Sailfish decided she had seen enough af Serendipity – and what she  had seen she didn’t like. So she spat out our lure for us to use another day.

……….Phew!