are we in the tropics yet?

We crossed the tropic of Capricorn on Monday, yay! Ever since our official arrival in the tropics we have been looking for signs of the tropics. We have watched diligently for flying fish and dolphins to no avail. True, we are in bikini weather sometimes but other times and especially during our days and nights of squalls we have also been bundled in our winter clothes. We caught a jack fish just before crossing into the tropics. He was mum about the signs of the tropics as he stabbed Peter in the finger with one of his dorsal spines. That fish must have really wanted to come aboard Marcy. We were barely making any way with light winds and huge seas. We had a fishing line in the water because we were close to some islands. They're secret islands. OK, maybe they're not secret because they are on our paper charts, they're even on our globe but they're not on our electronic charts. Anyway, we had a line in the water thinking there might be fish in the area but we were going so slow we had little hope of getting a fish. As we pulled the line in at sunset to put it away there was our fish on it just waiting to come aboard. What luck! Our entry into the tropics was also celebrated by chafing through our self steering line at 3AM the other morning. No problem, Peter had us up and going again by hanging over the stern the replace the line all before 4AM. Most exciting with our entry into the tropics came our ability to connect easily to our winlink email again. We've been using only sailmail by radio in South America and we can get a good signal to Panama now.

Today we are north of 17S latitude and we are finally enjoying steady winds at 12-15 knots and sunny skies. Day 5 in the tropics. We were visited by a large group of dolphins last night and this morning we saw our first flying fish in a year! It's good to be back!

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