21.07S 149.14E

Monday 11^th April, 2011

The rain has largely stopped for 4 days now although the heavens open overnight and 36kt winds continued over the weekend. This means much progress on the works; the engine is in and working, the winches are nearly done, the varnish is complete, the antifoul done, the baby stay done, and the forestay nearly replaced.  My idea of pushing  grease up each of the seacocks is apparently rubbish; they use some flash spray instead. Also the guy who serviced my 7 year old winch motor and said it was pretty bad, so we’ve asked him to do the other side as well; servicing the winches does not mean the motors! A few things remain SSB, Wifi booster, electric horn (!), and a few other minor things. Back in the water tomorrow with luck.

Hopefully this is my last rant about the useless Royal Navy, but they claim they can’t escort yachts because the ocean is too big and the yachts are too slow. Quite why a couple of MTBs can’t escort 30 odd yachts is clearly beyond my skills as a naval strategist; as a taxpayer, they would certainly be much cheaper than the £10+/min it costs to keep an aircraft in the air to take photographs of captured trawlers. There was however a bloke on Noonsite who got through with the Vasco De Gama rally recently. He said UKMTO were very helpful with information (only).

K

When we arrived in torrential rain and with a strong wind warning in place I was decidedly gloomy. I draw the line at sleeping in the boat on the hard up a 15 ft. ladder and not able to use the loo and got even gloomier when I couldn’t find a hotel…they were all full of miners on their days off or unable to work cos of the floods.

I found a cheap deal in a resort up the coast which has turned out great. Having booked a ‘garden view’ room [i.e. hedge] they have given us a lovely room looking over the pool and the ‘ocean’ now that the rain has stopped. We have a microwave and can heat up frozen beef vindaloo so K is happy.

All the stuff we wanted doing on the boat [4 months ago!] is now being done so we should be back on board and able to sort out the chaos soon. The boat has been well looked after. I couldn’t find the mooring lines but have realised that they and the halyards have all been used as extra tie downs when Cyclone Yasi was on the way. Good to know people care.

Shall make the most of a day by the pool

C