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02 December 2009

"How are you going to land that fish, bore him to death?"

We hooked up another dorado last night near sunset. There was some disagreement as how best to bring it in (Oisin: play the fish, tire him out; Sean: haul the thing in as quickly as possible, it's just a little dorado.) The fish escaped just before being landed - Oisin maintains it was so terrified by the blod-thirsty mob waiting on deck with knives and winch handles that it managed one last heroic effort to escape.

In other news, we've been one week at sea as of mid-day today.

It's another spinnaker day; going by the holes in various sailing gloves, the score is spinnaker 2, gloves zip. But we're sailing along nicely with it now.

Sean coiling spinnaker lines; gives you an idea of how big all the lines on this boat are.

Lots of completely random things going on today: did a bit of cleaning (things do get grubby with 7 folks living in a confined space!); and some laundry (the seas are calm enough for both washer and dryer to function well); glove repair (see spinnaker, above); and we've come far enough west that we're setting Boat Time to be minus another hour. There's a rumor of scones to be had later with some tea - we can be civilized even here in the middle of nowhere.

The Flora and Fauna report is getting a bit repetitive - plenty of flying fish, one suicidal fish overnight, a couple of dolphins heard but not seen on a night watch.

The off-watch crew have started playing a card game called "switch" - very much like the game of Uno, but played with a regular deck of cards. It's likely to become an obsession if we're not careful.

Hard to believe it's December - the water temp is 82, we're all on deck in shorts & tank tops!

If we stay on this schedule, it'll be time for the Halfway Party tomorrow - it's fancy dress (which none of us brought, except perhaps for Casey) so we anticipate getting very creative with bin bags (that's WT-speak for trash bags for our North American readers) and duct tape...

2 Dec 2009 14:00 UTC 18 23.975 N 35 24.241 W

- Anne, for WT