Author: Pam
While on watch this morning around 0500 I was sitting in the companionway reading Kon-Tiki, by: Thor Heyerdahl using my Itty Bitty book light when I came to his description of hanging the paraffin lantern out at night and realizing that flying fish were attracted to the light. Yikes, the thought of my Itty Bitty light attracting flying fish raced through my mind which included the possibility of one slamming into my head. This thought sent me back down to the cabin to continue reading. We had just heard during the radio net in the morning about Susan on the sailing vessel Dharma waking up to find two flying fish lying next to her in the cockpit. Yuck! Speaking of Susan, interesting story, she is a 72 year old woman who left Nuevo Vallarta four days before we did to make the crossing to Hilo, Hawaii, solo on her 32 foot boat. We have heard her every morning on the net. It sounds like she is making good progress, but she sounds lonely. Back to Kon-Tiki, Scott and are both currently reading it, we decided it was very apropos reading material for this crossing. The author a Norwegian biologist put together an expedition from Peru to the South Pacific on a raft in the 1940’s to prove his theory that the Island chains of the South Pacific had been populated by the Incas from Peru. He built the balsa wood raft identical to the first vessels of the original migrants and headed across the Pacific with five other men and a parrot. The first sentence of the book aptly sums up my feeling about our adventure; “Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way, but when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.” Similar thoughts have crossed my mind over the past months. I just realized it is actually seven months today that we headed under the Golden Gate. Wow! My final thoughts for the moment on Kon-Tiki, I am very happy to be on a boat with freeboard above the water line and some protection from the enormous amount of sea life that visited them on their journey, including a whale shark (the world’s biggest fish, it can be up to sixty feet long) and a snake mackerel (they were the first to see one living, it landed in one of the crew’s sleeping bags). Scott is outside right now preparing for our first fishing attempt, thank goodness we have small lures. Also an example of one of their safety checks was to be held upside down by their feet with their head under water to inspect the ropes holding the raft together, I can’t even imagine. I figure if they can make it on an open raft, we certainly can in our tough little boat. Highly recommended reading. Well, I am off to look for fish recipes in case we are lucky.
Scott with the fish report. Today we deployed our recently acquired trolling line behind the boat in hopes of catching some fish. Our trolling rig consists of heavy nylon cord attached to a rubber snubber. The snubber attaches to a mooring cleat on the aft deck and the nylon cord is run out from the rear of the boat. The nylon cord is attached to 25’ of a high test filament that then has a swivel shackle and a lure at the end. Our lure is white and purple with big eyes and two nasty hooks. My fishing experience is limited to catching trout in the Lazy River when I was about seven, and Pam’s is nonexistent, so together we make an armature team at best. I spent the day reading about cleaning and catching fish and I think I have a grasp on what to do. I will describe our techniques further if we actually catch something, until then no fish today, that makes fish 1 Tournesol 0.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment