day/night #13

day 13 turned out to be another good day for sailing to french polynesia.
even though with light winds in the first hours it allowed us to go on a straight line towards fatu hiva.
in the afternoon the winds picked up to about 15-17kn and we did good speed too, remaining unchanged during the night.
in the last 10 minutes of my 4:00-8:00 shift a squall passed through. as all the other squalls in the last days did not have a lot of wind in them, i was not too concerned and kept the sails out. it started to rain- usually a sign that the winds that come along with the rain have passed already - this time though after a few minutes raining the wind increased by ten knots within the blink of an eye. now with winds in the high 20's to low 30's we had way too much sail out and were a bit in trouble. helmi (our autopilot) simply lost it and was unable to hold course. i took over the rudder and tried to point the boat as downwind as possible - with the same result as helmi. with too much sail out maloo simply had to turn into the wind.
thank god, Mark was awake already and heard my calls. we reefed the sails in heavy rain and waited for the winds to pass.
since then we have 20-25kn and are flying along.
the squall was a reminder though not to take any passing shower too casual.
with the sails crashing heavily as they were, i am are lucky not to have damaged anything.

on the fishing side of things:
Mark caught a little mahi mahi in the morning hours that ended up as ceviche with coconut milk for lunch.
in the afternoon the reel went off again, and Mark could hardly get the break to work.
something big had gone on the hook . as the fish dove down we were pretty sure to have caught some sort of tuna, as the mahi seems to come up to the surface when reeled in.
after slowing the boat down and working for 25 min Mark landed what would have to be the biggest bonito i've ever seen - about 15kg. lucky for the bonito though, we are not starving and can be fussy. bonito does not taste good as we learned after catching our first one near gibraltar. in fact it got us off eating tuna for quite a while.
so the big bonito was released to get even fatter in the years to come.

hopefully it did not end up in the nets of the japanese fishing trawler we saw in the night.