Day 6 - Seagrass Fishing

It's been a few days at sea now. 6 to be exact and there are about 12 more to go until we reach our goal of Guadeloupe. It's late at night and I am sitting here during another night watch, after 3 hours of being awake from 01:30 to 04:30 I am slightly tired and my brain is a bit of mush right now. But I somehow like these calm times. The wind is good, the sails are full, but we are falling off course a little bit too far to the South. Usually during night watches I write a lot, listening to music, typing down diaries of the days that have passed, reliving the things that we did, and what I have experienced here on this very boat. And this is a very soothing activity. And it keeps me active and awake during these late night hours.

The 2 glasses of Coca Cola also help. I drink them with big gulps, getting that caffeine into my system so that I don't fall asleep. Every 6 minutes the AIS alarm goes off. There are so many things to fix on boats. It looks like the antenna of the of AIS system is pinging itself somehow, and that this process is broken somehow, leading to a failed scan whenever it does try to scan which leads to a meaningless but loud and annoying alarm. Meaningless, because the rest of the AIS is working fine.

Today overall was kind of a lazy day, since we didn't do much. Mostly sleep and eat. We had super delicious chocolate crepes for breakfast, some leftover fish curry with rice heated up in a pan together with an egg fried rice style for lunch and some kickass salty Canary style potatoes with Mojo Rojo and Mojo Verde as well as the leftover Mahi Mahi filets from the fish we caught 2 days ago. It was a heavenly treat.

I also did some sports in the morning. Not a lot, some Yoga, and some pushups (40ish) before the first crepe was handed to me from down below in the boat. Getting enough exercise on the boat is tricky. There's not enough space for it and the waves and movement of the boat make it even harder to overcome that initial resistance to the thought "ok let's exercise". And our food, while extremely enjoyable and fun to eat, high quality and fresh and all that is not the healthiest food either. We eat lots of sugar and fats and I feel like I am gaining a lot of weight on this journey. It all stands in quite the juxtaposition to the Outlive book by Peter Attia that I am currently reading.

By now, after traveling West for a few days, the time has shifted and the sun rises later because of it. But we also adjusted our night shifts so that everything is still "in time" so to speak. It's weird because with the boat moving 24/7 you feel how each day the sun sets a little later. It also gets warmer by the day.

Today we saw a shark. And the sea grass keeps floating all around the boat. It makes it harder to fish, today it was there in thick brown green patches, some of them 6-7 meters in size, just floating there. It trips the fishing wires, catching seagrass over and over again. And we have to keep pulling the lines in, letting them go back out, pulling them back in, back out, in, out. Because the fish we are trying to catch are mostly Mahi Mahi and Tuna... they don't have appetite for seagrass unfortunately.

Other than eating, we didn't do much else today. Just talking, cooking, and napping. Those are the days on the boat. Sometimes, if nothing breaks, you simply relax and let the days slip by. Listening to music, enjoying the sun and the water rippling endlessly towards the horizon, the sound of the waves and the wind, sometimes reading. Sometimes talking. Sometimes thinking.

We started to made a list of all the things (funny YT videos mostly) that any one of us somehow doesn't know and the list keeps growing rapidly every day. When we come back to the internet I'll compile it with all the links and share it with the group and then everybody has a solid chunk of awesome funny things to watch, that they didn't know before. I love this idea of compiling funny things and then sharing them with others. Getting people on the same level of shared memes and cultural understanding with things. It's delightful to show people nice things that you know but they don't. And then once such a shared piece of culture is established it goes into the jokes and start to stick there. And I love that.