“FISH ON!!!”
It’s a cry I heard a grand total of 15 times this last passage. In the first week it was the cause of great excitement, but towards the end I began to dread hearing that sound of the fishing line spooling out. I know that sounds incredibly ungrateful, but let me just explain why…
17kg Mahi Mahi – approx 30 portions, wahoo!
14kg Tuna – approx 30 portions, yum lots of seared tuna steaks.
17kg Tuna – approx 45 portions, cool – lots of spare for sashimi in the afternoons.
18kg Tuna – approx 50 portions, hmm I’m running out of ideas for ways to cook tuna…
10kg Tuna – OK guys enough now… throw it back…. My freezer is pretty full…
2 metre Marlin – OMG NO!!!
Fab shot of the mighty marlin taken with a GoPro dangled under the water on the end of a bit of line 
Filleting the biggest Mahi any of us have ever seen
They didn’t actually land the marlin thank god, just pulled it up alongside, removed the hook and let it swim away. I think the boys knew I would have had a fit if I had to try to fit all of that in freezer! We actually ended up releasing lots of tuna in the end. I put my foot down when 2 out of the 10 boxes in my freezer were solely filled with skipjack tuna, although I was made to concede that if they caught a blue fin or a yellow fin then they were allowed to keep it – thankfully for me, that never happened!
It became a real team effort on some occasions not just in actually slowing the boat, reeling in the fish and getting it on deck, but also in prepping it for the freezer. Initially the rule was that whoever reeled it in had to gut, fillet and skin the unfortunate creature and then it was presented to me in the galley to portion and vac pac. However by the 3rd fish I was a) pretty bored of having to do it all by myself and b) running very low on vac pac bags! So we turned it into a production line on deck:
- The “fisherman” guts and takes off the fillets
- The next person skins, tidies up each fillet and slices into portions
- The final person bundles up the steaks into packs of 2 or 4 and wraps in clingfilm ready to be stacked in the freezer.
Doing it this way made it much more of an enjoyable group effort, not to mention much quicker. Plus you can’t fathom how welcome a “group activity” is after 4 or 5 weeks at sea – any sort of change of routine feels great.
Tuna steaks from just one fish!
We’ve arrived in Polynesia now thankfully so no more fishing. I do still have a full box of tuna in the freezer though so any recipe suggestions, whack ’em in the comments section – I would be very grateful! Worst bit of the whole thing is that I don’t personally even like tuna steaks that much… Ah well.
Onwards and upwards. Discovering the food types and quality in Tahiti is top of my priorities now. I’m planning to go provisioning on Monday or Tuesday so I’ll let you all know how I get on!
x