LinoCat

Hi there, we just had coffee and some biscuits. The wind has died down and so we only make around 6 knots. We donated some coffee to the god of winds and so let keep our fingers crossed that we again get around 20 knots of wind. It is strange but you also get used to the fact that our windvane is broken and you can judge the apparent wind quite well from the waves and the boat speed. We only reconfirm it a few times with the handheld anemometer. Today it was my turn to be the netcontroller for group A, these are the yachts from 186 to 240 but due to the fact that we went south first we are quite a long distance away from the others and on channel 4c i can only hear half of the group. But i guessed this already in the last days and had spoken with Blonde Moment and Brindabella if they can step in and so after reading out the weather he took over the roll call. The schedule for such a SSB group is: 11:55 Radio silence on 4c (4.149 MHz) and VHF 16 and 77 to check for any vessel in distres...

Every few days it is a good idea to bring the parasailor down and check it for chafing. Everything looked fine so after 5 minutes the Parasailor was up again. At the start of the ARC we have used the normal sails but since then we only had the Parasailor spinnaker up. What a great sail!

The night was warm, it was the first night that i was sitting outside without my sailing Jacket but of course with life vest. At night everyone is not only wearing a life jacket but is also attached to the boat. This is important because no one might notice if you would fall over board. Or at least might pretend not to have noticed it :-) Since the water is warmer now we also found the first flying fish on the boat and showed it to Lani since she is such a big fan of fish. At the same time a small Mahi Mahi pulled on the fishing rod and i reeled him in and let him go since he was to small. Andi brought Christmas cookies from Chris parents and we hope that these will find their way into our night watch motivation boxes! The sun is out and it is already 24 Celcius. What a good start into a nice day.

In the afternoon we had another Mahi Mahi on the rod but he jumped off the hook maybe 5m away from the boat. A little later the reel was running off very very fast and when Andi stopped it there was very high tension on the line and then nothing.The second reel also started to run out a little later and then stopped.When we wanted to retrieve the lures, we saw that both were gone. Maybe ripped away by drifting debris or by really big fishes. So tomorrow morning we have to rig two new ones. In the afternoon i had a one hour nap after the ARC radio net, which is going from 1200 UTC to 1500 UTC. In the morning Andi particpated in the maritime round on 14.313 with Christoph DH2LV called "Seelotse". The routine check of all stanchions, lines, terminals, etc. was normal but maybe tomorrow we should get the spinnaker down, we will check it and bring it back up. This would would cost precious time and we are in a rally :-) Dinner was Spaghetti and a white sauce with feta cheese and p...