Day 3 - Fish or no Fish

In the morning we put out the fishing lines every day. Fish usually hunt during sunrise and sunset and so at least during those times we try to have our lines set up with good bait. And this time, we actually caught something. A loud bang goes through the boat when the fishing line gets drawn tense by the fish, triggering the fishing alarm beer can. It's definitely audible throughout the cockpit and some part of the boat and does it's job well. Christian, Rebecca and I are excited. Fresh fish for lunch? Hell yeah.

Chris slowly reels in the fish, and it fights, jumping out of the water and the waves in the distance, glittering in the sun, blue, grey, the pink bait sticking out of its mouth. It looks exotic from the distance and the colors are vibrant and scintillating underneath the waves as we get the fish closer and closer to the boat. Eventually we have to take the fish into the boat, but just as we lift it out of the water, it kicks itself lose from the hook and jumps off back into the ocean where it came from, never to be seen again. It fought so hard, it deserves to live another day.

After not catching the fish we would have liked we switch tasks. Somehow the toilet seems to be broken, and so we need to do disassemble it and see what's wrong. The smell of taking it apart is overwhelming and the insides of the pump used to draw the nasty things out of the toilet and sea water into the system via a vacuum is completely clogged up with minerals and salt that have fused with shit and piss over years. It's a completely disgusting sight and smell and we use a screwdriver to chisel the stone like debris away from the plastic parts of the pump in the hope of making it work again. With lots and lots of soap and a lot of scraping later, we are done and the parts look clean and nice again. Christian pre-assembles the toilet and everything seems to be working fine, almost. The vacuum doesn't seem to be closing correctly. So we unscrew the whole system once more, also add a completely new membrane and two new vents to the pump, and then re-assemble it again. Luckily the sea doesn't roll too much today so I am able to still help with these things without getting to sea sick and throwing up and I even volunteer to put the pump back together the second time around.

I'm usually quite bad with these sorts of things, but I want to practice it more, because knowing how to assemble and disassemble stuff in the real world is just as useful or even more so than knowing how to do that in the digital realm of code. But just like everything it needs practice. So much practice.

Eventually I am done re-assembling the whole pump and this time around everything works perfectly. You can even hear the valves open and close, because everything runs so smoothly and just right. It's weird but these small wins, like being able to flush the toilet more easily are worth it on a small space like a boat. Especially on a big crossing like this. And you don't mind the work somehow, because there is nothing to miss. Nothing else you could really be doing, except maybe reading or sleeping.

But after this whole toilet ordeal I go back to sleep. For just a bit, listening to music on my headphones. After a bit of a nap I wake back up, and start cooking. The plan is to make some soup that we can dip the bread in. An hour or so later and we have a steaming pot of root vegetable soup done and ready. With beautiful beetroots, carrots, potatoes, some bell peppers, some onions and freshly prepared vegetable broth, from all the vegetable cuttings. Rebecca doesn't know how to cook to much and so I show her the "Ole method" of quickly preparing a sort of broth, and how this same idea can be applied to pretty much any food. It's simple. Add some onions, something starchy, let it burn a little bit in oil, add water to get the brown caramelized starch into the water together with some salt and pepper and then let the while vegetables cook for some more.

Because the pot is so full with soup I have to hold it so it doesn't slip on the bigger waves and spill dark red boiling hot beetroot soup everywhere. The problem is that the pot got hot and so I have to take a piece of cloth to hold the pot in place. At some point I drop an end of the cloth directly into the gas flames of the stove and it immediately catches on fire. Luckily I have quick reflexes, panic, throw the whole thing into the sink and pour water over it within a second. Nothing bad happened. But still, fire on a boat is one of the worst things that could happen. There's nowhere to run to. But we have fire extinguishers in different places for the worst case. Let's hope we'll never need them.

In the end we have a nice soup, and lots of it and we feast on it for dinner before going to our respective night watches or to bed.