The average frequency of some minor disaster on cruising yacht is about one a week. We don’t have any real numbers to back that up, and not all weeks are equal, but 50 big problems a year sounds about right. So we were overdue.

In the middle of hanging out washing, Jon detected a smell of diesel in the air, on closer examination the deck around the diesel jerry cans we keep on deck was wet. No problem, that part of the deck is often wet from splashing waves. Only it wasn’t splashy today and it wasn’t water. A quick dip and sniff of a finger and oh bugger, it’s diesel.

It is at this point that those of you who have ever owned a teak deck yacht have put down your cup of coffee, put your head in your hands and mouthed your preferred expletive. Cos you know how much of a nightmare this is going to be to get out of the wood.

We soaked up what we could with rags, found the offending jerry can with a crack and then syphoned the remaining diesel from the can into our main fuel tanks below decks. With that can cleaned up and unable to cause more damage we started to try to clean up the deck. The good news about diesel is that it doesn’t just burst into flames, so there was no danger from the spill. The problem with diesel is that, unlike a highly refined fuel, it is very dirty so even when the fuel evaporates off it leaves behind a lot of dirt which has soaked into the wood.

About an hour of absorbing, soaping, washing, rinsing, soaping, scrubbing, rinsing, repeating later we have deck port side of the boat which is wet and still smells of diesel. Being quiet late in the afternoon at this point there wasn’t time for the sun to dry the decks and for us to have have a look at the damage done before it got dark. We’ll see in the morning.

Other than that, the day was a good one. Jon found that the answer to how to successfully land a fish came from just sending out the email asking for help – in rather the same way that calling IT support immediately causes the problem to resolve itself. So yes, after a couple that got away this morning we managed to land a nice big (20lb maybe) dorado. This all happened around lunchtime so rather than sushi for lunch we had it for dinner. Very nice it was too. And plenty left for Tina to cook something fishy for dinner tomorrow night.

Thanks to both Jon’s uncle Malcolm and Mia’s old school friend Kris for tips on what we doing wrong when it comes to landing the fish. As you both independently said exactly the some thing we’ll give your advice a shot the next time we hook something, hopefully tomorrow.

In other news, Teo finished his LEGO Y-bomber from star wars, which everyone agreed is completely amazingly awesome. It’s also great to know that he is perfectly able to follow the instruction for the 8-14 age bracket LEGO now which opens up mountains of the really cool sets. His dad in now plotting to buy all the other cool star wars LEGO, for Teo of course.

Mia continued with her bunting project and managed to enlist the help of Tina, so together they have made major progress, Itchy Foot may smell like a gas station forecourt but she’ll look dandy in the Pacific.