Another day sailing, albeit a little slower than yesterday. We sailed into the wind shadow of the Galapagos islands combined with being around 1 degree north of the equator puts us inside the ITCZ or the Doldrums as it was previously known. So the wind has dropped, but with it the sea, so while our speed has reduced the comfort level onboard is just fine.

We had a nice upbeat start to the day, plenty of coffee and as we were running the generator to charge the batteries we could also run the toaster. We are down to our last loaf of ‘eternal’ bread and soon we’ll start baking break everyday or so.

Bob (the boobie) stayed with us all night and Tina (who was on the early watch) informed us that he was up at dawn and went on several early morning fishing runs with the first light. Jon managed to scare him away this morning, while conducting his daily inspection of the boat and he (bob) hasn’t returned yet. Jon is suitably sheepish.

More boat school today (but it’s a Saturday?! don’t worry we’re not teaching him the days of the week, they have no use here and it’ll get in the way of boat school). More reading with Mia and more math game with Jon, this time Teo got to design a few cards himself and seemed to enjoy it more with a little more complexity added.

We caught a fish, actually we caught two but the first one managed to break our reel, snap 120lb line and take a lure with him. So that was big. But the second we actually caught, killed, cleaned, filleted and is ready to become ‘fish and mash’ on Sunday night. I’m starting to think there is very little too this fishing lark, we were in the right place at the right time and really they would have snapped up anything we’d hung off the back. The one we caught was part of a large group hunting smaller bait fish, the sea as full of them and it they were biting at everything.

Fishing seems to be one of those sports which is high on anecdotal evidence and very low on numerical data…

“Oh, you used the green squid lure with the bullet head on a cloudy day while traveling at 6 knots in a following sea with a spring tide? You fool! You should have used the yellow one, clearly!”

I suspect this nonsense is driven by several factors:

Firstly there needs to be some arcane knowledge which can only be gained by years of experience to give you a sense of progression and improvement. Otherwise it could be summarised as ‘Drag a lure near a fish”.

Secondly, you have to have something to do to make it an activity, researching lures, choosing the right lure, tying special knots, getting the distance for the trolling lure just right, changing it as the clouds roll in etc. Otherwise it could be summarised as ‘Drag a lure near a fish”.

Finally, humans are wonderful pattern matching machines, we see patterns wherever we can. We don’t even need enough data, I’ve spent the last few days trying out different lures, different depths, difference configurations, but what am I going to do with that knowledge – I’m going to tell some salty sailor in a bar that “Clearly you should be using yellow squid lures when…” After all it makes for a far more interesting conversation than “Oh I dragged a lure near a fish”.

But quite honestly, from what I saw today I could have driven a sock from the back and caught a fish. If any of us owned socks. Which we don’t.

So tomorrow I will try once again to drag a lure near a fish. I’ll be sure to tell you if there was one there.