Bad smells on board

Passage Panama to French Polynesia, day 16, Tuesday 4-Apr: Bad smells on board, and for once it’s not the Captain!
It was a beautiful full moonlit night’s sailing. Lovely 13-17kt beam wind and charging along (7-9kts) across a glittering sea and a few puffy clouds on dead-west trajectory to Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas group of French Polynesian islands. ETA 8 days. Can we really be there so soon?

Around breakfast time, I decide to check the Iridium-GO is still working. With the Starlink we’ve not had to use the Iridium sat-phone thus far. So I did a quick check-mail and found we had a message, in Spanish, from the Peru MRCC (Martime Rescue Coordination Center) telling us there is a Turkish yacht within 50nm of us that is reporting mechanical problems and we should keep an eye out for it and report the situation. Well, problem is, that Email was sent 2 days ago, and the yacht’s indicated position is now some 400nm behind us. Ooopsy! But we are quite intrigued how the MRCC obtained our email address. It can only have been through PredictWind because only PW would accurately know our Lat-Long position fix and Iridium email address. Very interesting though, that they can and would contact us like this. Comforting in fact.

During the day we have a rather sweaty session in the bilges. We have a very bad smell in the bilge compartment below the galley floor where we store onions, potatoes, and garlic, plus all our readily accessible drinks. It’s a very full compartment! The obvious thought was a rotten potato. We’d had that last year and it stank just the same. But no, all vegetables are hard and healthy. After emptying the entire compartment and finding disgusting smelling brown liquid, it turned out that fish juices had drained from the fridge drainpipe into the bilge compartment where it quickly putrefied. It was not a pleasant clean-up job, but happy to rid ourselves of the sickening smell. And to catch it before it got into the deep bilge. Could this be “revenge of the fish”? No, more likely a poor-quality plastic bag the fish was wrapped in!

Today our buddy boat got us added to a WhatsApp group for all the yachts out here sailing to French Polynesia. Quite a revelation to be on an internet chat group in the middle of the ocean! Until now we’ve had no internet access once away from land mobile phone signal. Each day, each yacht reports its position and weather and declares all good on board, or not. Quite nice to know someone would be looking out for us if we don’t report-in one day. Needless to say, everyone in the group has Starlink. Today’s chat is about several boats that have become caught up in “long line” fishing gear. Mostly a few hundred miles SW of Galapagos.
Some yachts had to spend several hour untangling from rudders and propellers. Hmm 🤔 not sure I’d happily dive the boat in the middle of the ocean. It would be too tempting for Oana to sail off and leave me for one!