This column is an opportunity every couple of months to go back and troll through the many vivid, great and spectacular memories I have from my years of boating.
I’m not sure why this month’s overwhelming memory has turned out to be smell.
Or, to be more accurate, stench. Boats seem to be machines that are capable of manufacturing and concentrating smells into some of the most incredible and awful things you have ever encountered.
So I thought I’d share the line up of Shane Kelly’s all-time greatest boating stenches.
Possibly the Worst Stench Ever and Certainly the Most Embarrassing
This stench came about when we borrowed a brand new Bayliner Trophy from the then-importer and took it down to the Motuihe Channel for a fish. Back at the dry stack much later we carefully cleaned the boat. Every square inch ... except that some bright spark forgot about a large bonito bait which had been secreted in one of Trophy’s many lockers. There are far too many lockers on those things.
Give it a couple of weeks brewing in the dry, very warm drystack and the importer turns up with a prospective client to show the boat. The crane lifts the boat down and the thing is hummin’. There were so many flies in that locker the boat floated 3 inches above the normal water line. We’re talking the maggot capital of the world. The result was no Trophy sale and one very pissed off importer who never again loaned us a boat. You can’t blame him really, can you?
Longest Stench Ever
The boys had been out fishing off Tiri and on returning to our launch site at Browns Bay, I injured my knee landing awkwardly as I jumped over the side. The result was me, bedridden with a sprained knee. The boys helped me get the boat home and it then sat in the front yard, with a dozen or so jack mackerel that had been left on deck slowly turning to pure fish oil and leaking down into the bilge. Down there was a little bit of salt water and the bungs firmly left in place. Let fermentation commence.
It took about three weeks before I came right and by that time the maggots in that boat were the size of anacondas. Laying traps for any birds that strayed too close and dragging them down into the bilge – they even managed to wrassel couple of neighbours’ cats down there. The clean up was not pretty.
The Swamp Gas Stench
Way back in the dark ages, I sailed on a 46ft ocean racer – some of the crews’ mad exploits have featured in this column before.
The boat used to exude a stench we called “the swamp gas.” Strangely enough this did not come from the head (although there were times when that appliance was sorely tested) but came from the keel. At least, we think it did.
You could see the swamp gas bubbling from the keel top through any bilge water that had accumulated and it smelt like nothing I’d ever experienced. We never did work out where it came from – possibly a void in the keel that some boatbuilder had crawled into for a kip during construction and they’d sealed him in there by mistake. You’d think they’d have noticed him missing but, given the state of many boatyards, perhaps not.
The Environmentally Friendly Stench
I do a lot of drift fishing. Therefore, I use the drogue a lot to slow the drift. The drogue I have is slightly different to many – it’s made from green nylon wind break/sunscreen mesh and has no hole in the back end. It works well, but has a bad habit of sieving the plankton from the water.
I discovered this to my retching cost after I slung it in the locker one day after fishing and left it there for a month or so – not knowing that it contained a football-sized wad of plankton. Now if you want to create really, really big stink, plankton is the finest way to get there. Trust me.
The Most Dangerous Stench
This came about many moons ago, when I unplugged my brother’s 16 cubic foot bait freezer from the wall to use the plug for something else. Just for a short while you understand, but I’m sure you can see where this is heading. I remembered its unplugged state a good long time later and was forced to engineer a blown fuse to that plug socket that would conveniently explain why his pristine bait supply was now slush. Stinking, filthy slush. He always was a violent bugger and I needed to divert attention. Fast. The fuse did the trick although they are surprisingly tricky to blow on purpose.
He doesn’t know to this day. Unless he reads this, of course, then I’ll still be toast, 30 years later.
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