Within 12 hours of leaving the coast we were in warm weather. Still no wind, but warmer! Over night we did have a couple spots of wind, and even some real sailing. Right now we are in between the southwesterly flow along the coast, and the Northeast Trade Winds. We expect to pick up the trades this evening, and have a fast, fuel free ride most of the rest of the way.

A bit over 150 miles from the coast as we were motoring along on a calm and glassy sea, we come up on a chunk of floating debris. No idea what it actually was, but a square about 4 feet on a side in water about 3000 feet deep. Like any such feature out here in the open ocean, such a thing rapidly becomes a fish attractor. For at least 100 yards around it there were swirling jacks and trigger fish, and a few mahi-mahi, yellow tail snapper, rainbow runners, a shark or two, amberjacks, and deeper down, wahoo.

We do have a minimal fishing kit onboard, so we stopped and tried our luck. We quickly hooked a small jack, and then another. The jacks are fun to catch, but not our idea of a great meal, and even though I could see the mahi-mahi following the lure, I couldn’t figure out how to get them to bite before the aggressive jacks latched on.

Sending the lure down a lot deeper, 100 feet or so, resulted in an instant hookup, and an almost equally fast cut off. A sharp toothed critter, almost surely a wahoo, sliced through the line. Another try resulted in a hook-up with a very small wahoo, about 5 lbs or so. I managed to get him boats side before even he managed to bite through the line attaching the hook to the lure, and that attainment is 300 lb test Kevlar cord!

On a beautiful day like this, would could have spent all day there if our time was our own, but with the limited fishing gear we have, and being on someone else’s clock, we fired up the diesel and set off again.