Today’s voyage was deliberately planned to be “shortish”. Each of the girl’s having recently been given a fishing rod and reel, we thought it would be fun spend some time fishing. However as all our previous attempts using handlines had not been successful, I wasn’t overly confident this time would be any different.
Leaving the harbour around 11:00am under an overcast sky and a 10-15 knot north-easterly, we tacked in a northerly direction toward St Helena. I intended to anchor in the bay on the western side of the island, which would shelter us from the prevailing weather while we fished. Beating into the wind on a starboard tack, we passed the island jetty when I misjudged our lateral drift and under full sail we glanced off the bow of a large trawler anchored just off our port side. The sound of our fibreglass hull striking steel was horribly loud; enough to literally wake the dead. I have no idea where the crew of the trawler were, no one came on deck to investigate, it was quieter than the Mary Celeste. I couldn’t see any damage to trawler hull, naturally enough, not even a scratch, and I was too disgusted with myself to see if we had scratched Lara.
At least the fishing was successful; Johanna and I each caught a small whiting, whilst Helena also caught a small whiting (probably the same one) and three small bream. All of the fish were tiddlers and after being given pet names by the girls and amidst frequent pleadings to take them home as pets, we released them hopefully to grow into pan-size “big-uns”.
Try as I might I couldn’t entice a fish onto Freya’s hook so that she could share the excitement of reeling one in, hopefully next time.
After lunch we set course for home on a long port reach until reaching the harbour channel where we ran before the wind into the harbour. Along the way Yolande tactfully pointed out that we were sailing awfully near to a channel beacon, which I acknowledged seeing, but denied we were too close, when the boom and sail, which extended well out on our starboard beam, struck the pile with a resounding clang. For one horrible moment I thought the mainsail was going to catch on the triangular plate and rip itself to bits, but thankfully nothing caught and we sailed on.
I resigned myself to having a crap day on the water, I mean hitting one thing on a trip is bad enough but two? I have no idea what was going on but determined to regain some pride decided to sail as far into the harbour as my nerve would allow me. We were well up the channel between the marina pontoons to our starboard and pile moorings to our port, before Yolande politely expressed a complete lack of confidence in my ability and requested that we start the motor. Looking ahead, I could see a large yacht using the entire channel to manoeuvre into its berth and decided that if he muffed it and baulked, we’d plough straight into his stern. Common sense prevailing, I dropped the sails and we motored slowly up to our pontoon where we tied Lara up for the night for the guys to rack the next morning.
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