Sunfishing

An important development of yesterday's morning was attaching VHF antenna to the top of the mast. When we got it out of the box Irina said, "I want to attach it", but quickly changed her mind when she found out it would require hanging at the top of the mast. David and Peter winched me up the mast where I discovered a bare coaxial cable with no connector. Great, I don't have one to crimp on. After an hour of working on the old cable (a good candidate for replacement) I attached the outer cable to the housing with the nut that holds the antenna in place and the inner cable was folded 4x, inserted as a pin and "secured" with duct tape.

To my amazement this worked! The main benefit of having a working antenna is that the AIS can now see other boats from 20 miles away!

As we pulled out of Plymouth harbor there wasn't much wind, so we took that as an opportunity to pull people on the floaty and swim.

When we were done with swimming there was some wind, so we set the sails and were pointing straight at Provincetown. Whale watching boats were all going far north, so it was clear we didn't have a chance to reach the same watching places.

And then David spotted a fin in the water. Sunfish! We rolled in the fishing line and tried to go closer to the fish. First it seemed that it swam away, but then the fin appeared very close to the boat. I hove to, and as we were drifting the fish got curious and ended up approaching the boat from the stern and entertaining us for 10 or 15 minutes.

Underwater photography with a phone is quite challenging because the screen doesn't work, but one picture turned out kind of ok.

As we approached the Provincetown sandbar we saw birds diving for fish, but our attempts to catch a fish yielded no results.

To everyone's delight as were motoring into the harbor, we saw a group of sea lions hanging out in the water close to the beach. What a treat!

There was one silly mistake that we made: we forgot that we were still trolling the lure behind the boat. Of course, the line got caught in the propeller and we had to cut it. A minor setback to an otherwise delightful day.