Friday 15th April 2022 - Gili Gede - Lombok

 Today we started out cleaning the bilges and cleaning out all the food boxes under the saloon seats. I store all my beer and wine under the floor in both bilges to keep it cool and to keep the weight down low, but since being back onboard I can smell beer, which not a good sign. 

For some reason lots of the cans of beer had ruptured, spilling their contents into the bilges and it was a rather putrid mess in both bilges. We got all the cans and bottles of wine out and I salvaged what I could and spent hours individually cleaning each can and bottle. Then on hands and knees, we mopped all the beer out of each bilge, flushing with fresh water until they were both spotless

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Once all the cans and bottles were clean, I stored them in the plastic food bins just in case some of the cans decided to explode or leak. All this booze would have to be consumed before entering Australia as we could only bring back 2.25 liters of duty-free alcohol each, so there might be some parties along the way.

 

Once we had the bilges sorted, we then turned our attention to all the canned food stored under the saloon seats. When I removed the seats, a disgusting putrid sight was revealed. Most of the tin cans of food had disintegrated and a lot of the contents were in a putrefied state in the bottom of the storage boxes. 

There were some good quality zinc coated steel cans still in perfect condition, but most of the cans were only zinc electroplated and had almost completely dissolved. I found this bizarre, as the air inside the boat is hot and dry and I didn’t expect to find any rusty food cans at all and I was certainly not expecting to see food cans disintegrated. 

So instead of just sorting out what food was out of date, I spent the rest of the day cleaning out the mess and scrubbing out the storage boxes and cleaning individual cans of food that could be retrieved from the mess. 

When we left Australia back in 2019, we had over $5,000 of food onboard and maybe $1,000 of alcohol and virtually all this food has been spoiled and thrown away and it’s looking like maybe 90% of the alcohol will also have to be thrown away. Thank you Scummo for not approving all my travel exemptions, how about we now talk about compensation? 

Once again it was another day of hot hard work which ended well after dark. At least the boat was now looking pretty good, both inside and out and I had confidence in her seaworthiness and all systems were working well enough to make a safe voyage back to Australia. As I was planning on leaving tomorrow, we could relax a bit tonight up in the restaurant and have a few beers while socializing with some of the other cruisers.

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