Crossing the Atlantic Ocean (Day 12) Fishing Failure

At 5am this morning we passed the 3/4 point in our passage and we now have less than 400 miles to go. The E or ESE wind has allowed us to point in the right direction for most of the day but tomorrow morning we'll probably put in another gybe to keep us heading for the northern end of Barbados. We've been looking at the approaches and there are some shallows to the south of the island that kick up some pretty unpleasant seas. We plan to avoid them and most probably look to complete immigration, customs and health checks paperwork at Port St Charles.

The weather today has been glorious and the 15-20 knot winds have allowed us to make reasonably good progress. With little cloud I was also able to take some sunsights today. However, I then had a right faff plotting our position; it kept working out up to 30 miles out. With a fresh pair of eyes on my calculations, Nicky spotted my error; I'd done one calculation as though we were in the southern hemisphere which, when changed into the correct calculation, made the results much more reasonable. My final solution was a point about 3 miles from where we actually were, so Nicky is still winning the astronav competition.

Reel sheared off its mounting on the rod and the snapped 50lb braid fishing line   

We hooked up a very big fish this morning, a 2 metre long Wahoo (think longer bodied tuna). It was a powerful beast and we had quite a fight on our hands to try to land it, especially because even with the genoa rolled away and the mainsail pulled in BV didn't slow down that much. The Wahoo leapt out of the water a couple of times which is why we know what it was and how big it was. The forces on the fishing rod were really high and it was bent in a curve through 90 degrees so there was at least 50lbs of force. That was just too much for my reel which promptly broke off the rod. So, we had a comedy 10 minutes where Nicky had her arms around me holding onto the fishing rod whilst I was hanging onto the detached reel trying to get some of the line wound in. As you would expect, given that we weren't using the setup as it was designed, with a loud ‘ping’ the 50lb line eventually snapped. It was probably just as well because a 2 metre long Wahoo would have meant an interesting wrestling competition if we had got it on board [Ed: and awful lot of fish suppers too!]. Sadly, with a broken reel there will be no more fishing on this passage, and the critter got away with my lucky lure too!!!

With the seabed over 4000metres below us you wouldn't thing that there would be much to bump into out here but we are approaching some buoys we must avoid hitting. Yes, amazingly there are 4 large weather monitoring buoys out here anchored to the seabed with +4000m long chains and we've just passed about 10 miles away from the 'West Atlantic' one.

Finally, we crossed into the next time zone today but, for a more companionable extra hour, we'll delay changing the ship's time until our watch changeover period tomorrow morning. When that happens, we'll be 4 hours behind UTC and into Caribbean time; we must be getting close!!!

Position at 0001 Fri 5 Jan: N14 03 W053 05
Distance run 1159 - 1159 local time: 148 nm
Distance run 2359 - 2359 local time: 154nm
Distance run so far: 1706 nm
Distance to waypoint (just N of Barbados): 382 nm

End of Day 12 position