Approaching the halfway mark to Isla Salut, it’s strange to think that the mouth of the Amazon is just off our port bow (albeit by 345Nm!). We are too far out to see it’s silt-laden discharge but the pilot books explain how the N. Atlantic Equatorial current bends it NW along the coast. Maybe we’ll see evidence of this once we converge on the coast in a couple of days time.
Thankfully the breeze picked up last night around 11pm and we’ve been sailing with full main and gib since. This is a big relief as we weren’t able to refuel in
Our other drama today was almost landing a 70lb Wahoo! At around 11am local time, the rod whizzed into life and although we feathered up into the wind in an effort to slow down, I’m convinced that the monster Wahoo was already towing us backwards! After a 25min fight between man and beast, we got it to the transom and gaffed it. Apparently our gaff is only rated to 65lbs (or there-abouts) because it promptly tore in half. In the heat of the moment, I thought pulling it on deck the old fashioned way would do the trick. About 6inches from grabbing it behind the gills, the 280lb leader snapped, possibly due to earlier chomping from the monsters razor sharp teeth.
Seeing the Wahoo exhausted and floating stunned on the surface, we spun the boat around and as I was grabbing the boat-hook from the laz, saw a black shadow of something that made our monster look like a minnow…we assume that whatever it was swallowed our prize whole before we even got turned.
We have since upgraded our lure to on of Jeff’s specials and hope to catch a real monster next…watch this space…
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unique visits since 2010-02-17