Meanwhile the rest of the family had a great week at the Clarion Hotel of Mackay! We shared a master bedroom the 3 of us...

… with a splendid view over the harbour as well as the dockyard where Take Off was taken care off.

  

Every morning we had our compulsory morning dip in the hotel’s pool… but seriously it was freezing cold! We tend to forget that this is however their winter. We then worked with schooling all morning. During the afternoon Alex and Inez practiced their different new exercises on their scooter while ...

 

... Louise checked on the work done on Take Off which was to repair the rudder and the bearing to the rudder. This time we could see that it was properly done! We had a great team of Tim, Mark and Richie. We also had Dalen repairing our engine as we had no working engine. Although the service had been done in Fiji 3 issues had to be changed: the mixer (gas - water) was totally clogged, the water pump had to be changed and the cooling system was cleaned. This is now our new rudder bearing all repaired.

 

As Take Off was now on land we also checked the keel bolts if they had tightened them properly in Fiji after repairing the keel from our incident hitting ground last year. This can only be done when the boat is on land and the keel is not hanging loose (that is being without pressure). Richie managed to turn a whole turn on the bolts! So yes we are happy we were stranded in Mackay so we could fix all these issues before continuing the rest of the tour back home (only 19 000 NM left…). We felt very secure in their hands, their knowledge and service.

   

Friday 4th of August at the very last hour of the working afternoon Take Off was finally ready to once again be hauled back, hopefully this time for good. Tonight Jörgen will arrive at 22h30 and we are hoping to be able to leave Mackay tomorrow to start discovering the East Coast of Australia all the way to Darwin.