And . . . we are motoring again. But we had 24 glorious hours of sailing. We are happy! 👍😀😆😎. The GRIBs show no more wind between here and Suokin. As I write this (8:28 a.m.), we are 330 nm from Suakin’s anchorage. That means we will arrive overnight Friday/Saturday. As you can imagine, that is not an ideal time to arrive in a Muslim country. We will notify our agent today and follow his directions. (You may recall that we were able to move to the berth on a Saturday in Oman, also a Muslim country.)

And . . . we caught a tuna yesterday – the first one with just the two of us on board. It was quite unlike the other times we fished. The line had only been out for perhaps 15 minutes and we were – sadly – paying it little mind. By the time I perked up, the fish had taken *a lot* of line off the reel. No problem, it simply meant *a lot* of reeling.
A copious amount of reeling later, we had a tuna on the boat. A very pretty fish. As you would have surmised, we had tuna for dinner.

For those of you who are interested in what we are using for fishing gear, we are using a Shimano TLD 2-speed 50 LRSA reel. I think it is pretty.

This was Michael’s first time filleting a saltwater fish. It had also been years since he had filleted a freshwater fish. He muddled through it, though! We have many nice tuna steaks. That said, we both agree that we need to watch some YouTube videos.

We have encountered many ships in the Red sea, two on a “collision course.” Keep in mind that the collision course warning is a bit overly dramatic. Both we and the tanker/cargo ship/big ship have plenty of time to change our course. Typically the ship is the one to change course well in advance since they go a lot faster (two to four times) than we do or can. When I was in between two ships – one coming from behind and one coming towards us with us smack dab in the middle – and because we were off our rhumb line anyway, I was the one who moved. That was at about 6:00 a.m. this morning.

At one point during the day, we heard our boat’s name on the handheld VHF radio.  This seemed rather odd to us as we don’t know anyone on the Red Sea and certainly didn’t expect anyone to hail us.  They hailed us twice.  We realized that it was coming from a navy ship on our port side.  We responded twice but they never replied.  We decided to change our course slightly to starboard in case they thought we were too close.  We did  that and nothing more happened.  After a bit, we went back to our course.  I should note that we pulled out the binoculars to try to see which country the ship was from, but we couldn’t tell.  It shall remain a mystery.

Hope you all have a wonderful day! We might write again tomorrow, depending on what today brings.

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