Long live the Queen

Fleck
Mon 14 Jun 2010 01:16
Location: Bundaberg Port Marina, but now in the water!
 
Position 24:45S 152:23E
 
Monday, 14th June.
 
Gosh, it feels cold here: about 12 degrees at night, and it gets up to 24 if it's sunny, or nearly 20 if it is overcast during the day. When we arrived it was an unusually hot day, and we sweltered in our shorts in our hire car. Now we are in our thermals! It's not just the whinging poms either, the locals are all miserable too! Another reason then for wanting to be off up north. So far there have been favourable winds from a generally southerly direction, so lets hope that these last. Why are we still here? well, a mountain of tasks: as 'Fleck' gets older so she seems to require more and more upkeep, and considerable expenditure: some obvious parallels for the happily married amongst us! This blog is mostly about testing the computer and satellite connection, as I still need my weather forecasts, and these are more difficult to obtain as we travel north, and away from regular shoreside communities.
 
Crew for this trip is Hannah, aged 11 and a half, escaping the final weeks of her last term at Bromsgrove School. We have a School teddy bear, which we have promised to photo in as many locations as possible. Hannah has proved useful with the fitting out, and is still covered with antifouling. Like some of the other complicated parts of the boat, she is fairly high maintainance! As I write she has finally been persuaded to practice her flute. Tomorrow we have an old rent car to collect our newly regalvanised anchor and chain from a downtown factory. Why not collect today? Well, its the Queen's birthday, a National Holiday: no wonder they havn't voted for a republic yet! This holiday came as a surprise, and has put us back a day. Now we hope to leave on Wednesday.
 
More soon, perhaps we will get to tell you about our Singapore stopover: very sucessful if you like theme parks, and not at all bad for me either!