Wed March 2 We leave Galapagos Islands today. It has been an interesting stay but I have now seen enough Galapagos Sea lions (up close and personal, not exactly a Chanel No. 5 smell, not even close), blue footed Boobies, Giant tortoises, etc. Time to move on. Late yesterday afternoon I was swimming around the boat and noticed a brown slim building up below the water line. When this was wiped off I could see some very small barnacles growing. These have to go before we leave to cross the Pacific. On the morning of leaving we had to clear customs etc. and get our Zarpe (Authority to leave). This all takes time and I wanted to talk to Andria on Skype before I left and the race start was at 12:00 midday. At about 10 minutes before the race start I was just finishing cleaning the hull with the help of Jeremy. Sabine gave me a strong hurry up message that the race was starting in 10 minutes, and what am I doing cleaning the boat. Hmmm! she is right, but a clean hull and propellers is much more important to me and Zoom than being on time for the start of the race which will be over 20 odd days. The differences in arrival times will be in hours and days not minutes. Sorry Sabine Zoom care wins. The first day out of Galapagos was some nice sailing. We got our spinnaker out for a few hours before the wind died. Friday March 4 We have been motoring for a couple of days. There seems to be a smell developing on the boat. I get a whiff of it when I come down the steps into the port hull. I do a small repair of the device that measures the level of fluid in the holding tank ( sewage tank) hoping that will stop the smell. It does not. Sat March 4 I cleaned the bilge and spayed it with Clorox. This did not clear the smell either and the next day it was worse. Sun March 5 I did a serious detailed pattern of sniffing to find that the smell was coming from the vent that vents the air from under the freezer. I removed a drawer to gain access to this area. I used a neat new tool that Andria sent to me, a 4 colour video monitor with a 1m fiber optic viewing scope that allows you to see into hard to get to places. I could not see anything that could give rise to the smell. I cleaned out this area anyway and spayed it with Clorox as well. It now smells like a dental clinic. A dental clinic with still a very bad smell over riding the Clorox. Hmmm some more Sherlock Holmes detective work to be done. The freezer is a chest freezer with the door on the top. I opened the door and looked down beside the freezer chest. There was a chicken breast in a small zip lock bag. It must have fallen from the freezer when we were stuffing if full of supplies when we left the Galapagos. You can imagine what it smelt like after 4 days in 35 degrees. At last the bad smell is gone from under the freezer. Now it just smells like a dental clinic. Monday March 5 When we left Galapagos we purchased a large bunch of Bananas, I mean really large. We hung it up in the cockpit, it was about 3 feet long. Over the next few days they were getting all ripe together so we were eating bananas for breakfast lunch and dinner. Sabine and Jacqui baked a banana loaf. Whow it smell fantastic. So good in fact that I wanted another loaf made to put behind the freezer vent to kill the dental clinic smell. Some of the banana were frozen and we have had some great banana smoothies with fresh yogurt made on the boat. Yummy. March Wed 9th 7d 44m South, 106d 32m West Late today I noticed some more areas of the main sail that needed some patches applied. When patching them Sabine spotted another area of damage. Well spotted Sabine. This area was much worse than what I was originally trying to patch. We reduced the main down to the second reef point to take the strain off the damaged area. I was tired and a bit dehydrated ( i.e. mild headache) so did not feel like addressing it at this time so we continued along slowly on second reef. Then the auto pilot control gave a message that the drive pump had a problem and we started to go way off course. We stopped the boat to put the rudder on the Hydrovane self steering unit so we would not have to hand steer for the next 1500 miles. One of the reasons I installed this device was just for this type of situation. With the boat stopped I was kneeling down close to the water to attach the rudder. I larger wave broke over me and . HISSSSS my automatic life jacket inflated. That was enough for the day, damaged main lost auto pilot and used up one on the recharge kits for my life jacket. Time to go to bed and rest before something goes wrong. March Thur 10th Feeling much better after a sleep and rehydrating. I pulled the auto pilot drive motor apart. The most likely thing to fail on these according to the manufactures is the brushes. I had a spare with me, but when taking this part apart they appeared to be OK. There was a lot of carbon dust from the wearing of the brushes, but there was still plenty of the brush material present. I vacuumed this out cleaned the commutator and put it back together. Yippee it worked perfectly. Now for the main. We put a line between the fist and second reef points on the leach to protect this damaged area from strain and then continued on full main again. Crew are now happy because we are back to good speeds again. Mon March 14 Lat 9d 36m South, 119d 28m West For the last week we have had good winds. We are now over half way and have 1156 miles to Hiva Oa in the Marguesas. All good. Andria left the USA to fly back to Australia today. 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