The Voyage of Spectacle

After a rather acrimonious wrap up in the Galapagos, we pulled up the stern and bow anchors and headed off to cross big blue about 1:00 p.m. two days ago.  I must say that it’s a weird feeling to leave harbor (and in this case, a very rustic harbor) knowing that there’s no land for 3000 miles.  I kept saying, “I can’t believe we’re leaving right now for a 3-week passage.”  Most of our closest friends and family know that we’ve been anxious to get this leg of our journey out the way, so as weird as it is to go to sea for a minimum of 3 weeks, I’m still eager to get to the South Pacific.

Day 2 presented some really sublime sailing … calm seas, consistent wind, sunny skies, temperate weather.  At dawn, I was enjoying my morning coffee after just taking over watch from Andy when a huge pod of dolphins crossed the bow.  There must have been a thousand of them leaping and bounding.  It was a wonderful beginning to a nice day.

After watching scads of flying fish scurrying about all day long, we felt pretty confident that predators lie below us.  One flying fish actually flew onto the boat, ricocheted off the boom, and flew into the cockpit giving us all quite a start.  Later in the day, I thought I saw another pod of dolphins swimming alongside the boat this time.  I peeked over to watch them swim, and then began to wonder why they weren’t surfacing at all.  Upon closer review, I realized that they were not dolphins at all, but yellow fin tuna.  Huge massive 4-feet long yellow fin tuna … at least 10 of them. 

Andy put lines out immediately, but he only succeeded in losing one lure to an unseen leviathan and having another fish (a sizeable wahoo) break free just as we were trying to land it.  So far, it’s Fish 2, Andy 0.