Day 174-175
In the first two days, we experienced big swells coming from a huge low pressure system north of us that had travelled hundreds of miles to get to our location. But that didn’t affect us much. However, we frequently had to make sail changes because of squalls. They were coming and passing bringing with them strong winds and pouring rain. One squall caught us by surprise, we had too much sail and the 40 knots wind overpowered the boat. I was at the helm, in a matter of seconds Seeker heeled over so much on her starboard side that the railing touched the water. I had to use all my strength on the helm to bare away.
In another instance, the rain was so strong that I couldn’t see the bow, my visibility was reduced to 10 meters.
During a more quiet time, we sailed passed a fish aggregation device (FAD). This particular device looks like a long suck of about 1 foot in diameter and at least 30 feet long (I couldn’t see deeper). It is put in the water by fisherman to create an ecosystem and once it has been in long enough to accumulate sea life around it, they track the device with the GPS equipment attached to it, come back to the location and catch the fish. Our fishing lines were in the water and very soon after we passed the FAD, we caught a 6 kg big eye-tuna. We had fresh food for two days!
Ben
