[password]seabird14
[position] 06 32.1 N 043 48.7 W
[heading] 290T
[speed] 8.3kts
[weather] 22kts NE, seas 2.5m NE swell and 1m cross seas, cc 70%, 1015 mb, 86F
[status] DAY 22 1108 nm to Grenanda. Stbd broad reach sgl rf main and jib, 8.2kts at 290T. Each morning at the tail end of his wee hour watch as the sun comes up Harley puts into the oven our daily loaf of bread to be baked. This gets the heat of the baking out of the way early and allows the off watch to awake to the the sweet, wonderful smell of fresh baked bread to be soon followed by freshly brewed coffee. This morning after sliding the loaf in and closing the oven door, all hell broke loose. A cacophony of rattling and thawcking metal erupted. Harley immediately went into captain mode thinking the boat was sinking or the oven was about to explode. After a quick inspection of the oven he determined the oven was fine and in fact the noise was coming from the nav station, the heart of all our electronics. He quickly moved to the nav station whereupon the problem became obvious. The distinct and pungent odor of fish made it clear what had happened: a flying fish had launched itself into the dorade and down into the dorade box where it proceeded in its efforts to escape to dismember itself. Those of you perhaps not familiar with a dorade, it is essentially a metal wind scoop where the wind and not the water (or fish)is routed below, and under current conditions it is the only ventilation available to us. It did not take long for the overpowering odor of dying fish to supplant the sweet smells of bread and coffee. As captain Harley was then tasked with cleaning out the remains and attempting to eradicate the odor lest we spend the remaining days on passage gagging on the smell of decaying fish. A half bottle of the French equivalent of febreeze seems to have solved the problem, although now it is as if we are sitting in a dry cleaners shop. Meanwhile surfs up, the rogue waves are keeping us honest and we are planning tomorrow's under 1,000 miles to go celebration.
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