Finally sunshine

Today, day 3, and finally a real break in the weather.  It’s partly cloudy, abundant sunshine, and most importantly, calmer seas and not raining sideways. 

In the trawl net we’re mostly having small catches –all five kinds of salmon, pomfret, prowfish, tiny little squid, and jellyfish.  It’s not been taking too long to sort and process them, and now the stations are far enough apart that it’s 2 hours or so between stations.  It’s a nice break.  

Food on the boat has been pretty good…though sometimes weird.  The cook is a woman originally from Poland.  We eat salmon usually every night for dinner, plus another main dish.  Like every other boat I've been on, it's meat-heavy food.  Even the veggies have bacon or sausage in them a lot of the time.  She makes really good soup, and it was so good to have soup when it was cold and rainy outside.  She keeps a lot of snacks and fresh baked goods around – candy, chips, fresh bread, cookies.  The ‘weird’ part comes in with her choices…for dinner tonight there was braised turkey legs, steamed green beans, white rice, brown rice, and pasta.  That’s a lot of starch options.  Oh, and there’s always lettuce and fixins for salad.  

The highlight today – we caught an ocean sunfish (aka mola mola) in the trawl net!   It was HUGE.  And they are bizarrely hard and rough, not what I’d expect.  We scrambled to let it go alive, and it seemed to be ok when we let it go.

Since the weather was crap yesterday I didn’t get a shower.  Now I smell gross and fishy and am definitely looking forward to a shower tonight.