Roxy’s free writing (including wine) 5 senses.

It was 02:00 and I had the helm on Sky Pond - it was my 3-hour watch. My husband Carl and our third crew mate, a curmudgeon of an Aussie, Alec, were asleep down below in their berths. Every sailor knows that if something is going to go to hell on a sailboat, it is going to happen at 02:00 when its pitch black and the seas are rough. It just does. Problems don’t occur in calm seas in the clear daylight. And the most hazardous danger on a boat is a fire.

As a crew, we had completed leg 1 of our delivery passage of Sky Pond. We sailed from Vietnam to Darwin, Australia over a five week period, where we had some emergency repairs completed while moored in a beautiful, calm marina. Leg 2 began a week prior to this episode. We were sailing from Darwin eastbound around the top of Australia, north of the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland then south to Cairns. We missed the optimum weather window and were sailing against the wind and seas making only 3 knots of speed on average.

Since the wind was against us, we were running with just one of our two diesel engines and no sails. Our catamaran has two diesel engines, one at the stern of each hull. Running both engines simultaneously does not net a great difference in speed. So running one is the optimum tactic. (Since David is a sailor, he would be interested in this detail)

The seaway north of Cape York is called the Torres Strait. It's a stretch of water that's about 150 kilometers wide at its narrowest point and stretches for 300 kilometers. The strait is home to numerous islands including the Torres Islands. A characteristic of a strait, even one that is 150 kilometers (93 miles) wide, is that the water gets compressed between land masses. As a result, strong currents are created from the compression along with contributing tides and wind affects.

The pounding noise of the fetch against the hull and the wind whirling through the bare rigging had been a constant for the last week since we left Darwin. While at the helm at 02:00, I was keenly aware of our speed, the derived currents, the wind speed and wind direction. I was also aware that our course was woven through the Torres Strait islands, which, of course, are not visible at night except as red blobs on our radar screen.

All my life, I have had an unusually strong sense of smell. My olfactory system is superior to most. So when I detect a hint of an electrical fire, my husband pays attention. I am always right. The smell I detected that night was different than anything I had encountered before. Not quite electrical, no, more chemical in nature. My instincts were confirmed by one of our automatic gas detectors on board. It’ started to squeal.

At this point, I ensured our auto pilot was on course and ran down the port companionway to wake my husband then to the starboard side to wake our crew mate.

We searched the boat to locate the source of the acrid smell. Lifting the saloon settee, we discovered one of the boat batteries, the starter battery, was hot to the touch and spewing gas like a volcano. It had expanded beyond the capacity of it’s container. Alec screamed, “aye mate, it’s gonna blow in your face, you’ve gotta pull it out and dump it overboard!” At this point, my stomach is backing up into my throat. I tasted fear like I’ve never tasted in my life! I grabbed one of our fire extinguishers and was at the ready. Knowing that a battery was possibly going to explode in Carl’s face while we were weaving between islands in strong current at night was terrifying.

Thank goodness Carl is a chemical engineer. He knew the chemical composition of the battery and our electrical system. So he disconnected the battery and let it cool off. The expansion ceased and the gas stopped spewing. During the remainder of my watch at the helm, I kept the fire extinguishers nearby. The next day’s problem was to figure out how to run the engine and the electronics after turning the engine off without the blown-out starter battery.