Aloha Mini Mahis (by Conrad)

We turned south around Cuba and the wind turned off.  Without getting into the nitty gritty of sailing angles, I was a bit bummed as this would have been the exact time I would have loved a good breeze from the east like we had had throughout the Bahamas pounding.  Sometimes when sailing, its hard to avoid the sense that you are being punked, the wind is just never coming from where you want it when you need it, but complaining doesn’t help so I'll shut up about it =)

Anyway, the calm weather allowed us to sleep a bit, make a decent meal, fix all the stuff we had broken, and start to think about fishing.

200 miles south of Haiti Andrew spotted something huge floating in the water off to port.  Recalling the time he found a chunk of Russian rocket fuselage complete with Cyrillic writing and space age materials and construction, Andrew wheeled us around for a closer look.  Upon inspection it was an 8x10ft chunk of plastic siding, not quite as cool as a soviet rocket ship…but it had fish underneath!

Dropping two lines in the water we circled around for a close pass and before we even set the lines we had our first Mahi!  A short fight ensued before we got our new buddy reeled up to the boat, a beautiful 2 ½ ft Mahi glowing blue and green and mad as hell.  While a respectable fish he was a little on the smaller side and so after taking this portrait we unhooked him and set him free, confidently assuring ourselves we would get another one of more impressive dimensions.  We did catch two more but all were mere teenagers like the first so we released them and continued on our way, not to catch another fish for 600 miles…