Mystery death of cruising sailor unsolved after nine months.

by Lisa Mylchreest on 11 Jan 2010 The tragic death of a cruising sailor in Port Vila after she took a solution given to her by fellow cruising sailors for malaria sounds a warning bell to those travelling in strange waters and accepting unknown medications from other well-meaning but unqualified cruisers.

Doug Nash, a retired scientist, met and and then married Silvia Fink on a yacht. They started their voyage on Windcastle, a centre cockpit Spindrift 43 in the 2004 Baja Ha-Ha Rally from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas.

After reaching Panama in December 2005, they decided to head west, exploring Galapagos, then crossing the Pacific to New Zealand in 2006 visiting many island groups along the way.

'We had a tremendously successful romance and developed a great partnership. Our goal was a complete circumnavigation, but that came to a screeching halt in August.' Nash told the Sydney Morning Herald.

To ward off malaria, some fellow cruisers offered Silvie a bottle of MMS - Miracle Mineral Solution, which she took. Some illness was apparently forecast on the bottle when first taking the mixture, so for the first few hours Silvie and Doug coped with her becoming nauseous, vomiting, with worsening abdominal pain.

After a few hours, a doctor was called, but Silvie died just nine hours after taking the mixture, in spite of the best efforts of the attending doctor.

Because of bureaucratic complications, the official cause of death has, at the time of writing, still not been delivered, and John Nash, an incredible nine months after Silvie's death, is still waiting in Vanuatu on Windcastle for the results.

Whether the mixture was not as indicated by the cruisers, whether the MMS reacted badly with other medications that Silvie had taken, whether Silvie had some allergic reaction, or some other reason, is still unknown, and will remain unknown until the autopsy results are published. In spite of a continual round robin of bureaucracy, Doug Nash does not know when that will be.

The dream of sailing round the world is tragically ended, but Doug Nash cannot move on.