Crossing the dateline, fishing and spinnaker sailing -it's pretty busy out here

Our wind was pretty good until last night. We did 125 miles in one day, which is not great, but pretty average for us. After the sun came up, I decided to put out the fishing lines. We were going over a bank that Andy had been talking about and he thought there might be a good chance of fish. And he was right...but they weren't meant for us. Andy was still asleep and I was making Jake breakfast when I heard the line buzz. I ran out to see the fish flapping in the water but when I pulled on the line, it was gone. And it took with him, one of our brand new lures. So I pulled in the line and decided to put out another one, seeing as we were right over the bank. You would have to be on the boat to see the position I was in, but I was trying to secure the line in the bungee we use to show when we have a fish on and I didn't have a good grip on the spool. You guessed it. A fish hit and snagged the line, spool and all, right out of my hand. Jake heard a few words mommy usually doesn't say and watched me rant around the cockpit about how stupid I was for a few minutes (I should have secured the line before putting it in the bungee) when he asked me "Mommy, are you going to CRY?" Not in the worried, sentimental way, but in the 'I can't believe you're going to cry about a fishing line' kind of way. It was only 30 minutes before Andy was supposed to get up anyway and I thought he might be interested to know that we were crossing his precious bank with only one line out and it had the cedar plug on it, not getting much action. Or so I thought... As he rigged up a stronger lure for the first line, I pulled in the cedar plug so he could put something new on it as well. No cedar plug. In 15 minutes, I had lost three lures and an entire line. Not a good way to start the day. Lucky for me, Andy just laughed at me. So after eating spaghetti last night for dinner (instead of tuna), the winds died and we met our threshold (moving less than 2 knots) and fired up the engine.

Today is a new day. The squirrel (i.e. spinnaker) came out of the bag, but is behaving herself by giving us a respectable 5 knots in 8-10 knots of wind and we are about to cross over another bank. Andy had more line, so he's rigged up another "spool" which is really just a piece of spare wood that he's put a handle on and we now have three lines out. We're not thawing anything out in the hopes of some fresh sashimi tonight.

While he was playing McGiver, I asked him if we had crossed the dateline yet. Our electronic charts don't notate it and neither does our paper charts, but according to our decorative map on our table, we apparently crossed the dateline sometime yesterday...somewhat uneventfully. So, if you would like to know what the weather will be like tomorrow, send me an email and I'll fill you in. We were -10 hours from GMT...now we're +12 hours from GMT. It's all very confusing as it's not even a 24 hour difference. With daylight savings thrown in, who knows what time it is. I guess we really don't care what time or day it is until we get somewhere near civilization. And even then, I think these people mostly go by the weather...they do all their work in the a.m., lay around during the hot hours of the day, and then pick it all back up once the sun starts to go down. We're already in tune with that program, so all is good.

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