February – March 2022
The middle of February saw us heading back up to Port Douglas, and we ended up berthed just down from our friends the Mad Macs. We are spending many pleasant evenings discussing destination options for the next cruising season over cards. My contribution to card night is usually dessert. John likes the Rum Cake… and the Lemon Meringue… and the Trifle and… well it doesn’t seem to matter what I take he will happily eat it – what a good friend. It’s a good thing we are within walking distance of each other, as you shouldn’t eat and drive after my Rum Cake.
February also saw me watching the winter Olympics while locked inside with the aircon running. There is a lassie from Leonora (a West Australian Goldfields town, of next-to-no-people, summer temperature a billion in the shade), and she is in the bobsled finals – how bizarre. It’s a bit like Cool Runnings – Go Kiara.
March is still hot and we have thunderstorms and heavy rain coming through each evening. Quite often we watch as the storm front curves around us. We booked to do a river rafting tour but it was cancelled due to excessive rainfall. When we finally did go the water was still very high with a fast current that was a wee bit scary when all you are piloting is a li-lo.
We are planning on doing a season in Indonesia, with the MadMacs and AraRoa. So, Peter is re-learning Indonesian on my Duolingo. There is a bit of work to do organising vaccinations, health checkups, export and import formalities etc. But the Macs have been to Indo quiet a few times (they have an adopted family up there) so Jenny and I should be able to just follow Tracy’s lead. The AraRoa crew are on a road trip around Australia while we wait for the right time. Jenny and I are regularly exchanging information, mostly about how we go about travelling internationally with our furry crew members.
We are taking advantage of this lull in proceedings to do some more odd jobs (I have to keep Peter busy somehow).
First off it was the tender. She had developed a bit of a Titanic problem lately (water on the wrong side of the hull)– she has a false bottom and we have been hearing sloshing in there. And she has been putting on weight (but haven’t we all when spending this long in port near a bakery). We offloaded her today and tipped her up to drain the water (there is a plug for it) and we have finally found the tiny crack causing all the problem – yay. Time to crack out the boat bog.
It looks worse that it really is – we thought we’d repair all the dints in the bottom while we had the bog out. Now to find the sand paper before it starts to rain again.
Sometimes it’s the little things that can make you very happy. In this case it’s Peter putting up 4 little hooks up for me to keep my boom ropes neat and dry. If they touch the top of the winch housing they stay wet and go green.
Next on to the life-raft. It needs to be serviced every three years, so it’s off to Brisbane for an appointment with a specialist company. [You can service a life-raft yourself, but it is not one of the things that Peter and I want to risk getting wrong]. And while the life-raft’s away, Peter has decided to play.
Oh dear, I love the confident way he is drilling holes in my roof. “Trust me”, said Peter. I’ve heard those words before, just before a tree fell onto my fence, from a Beloved wielding a chainsaw, many years ago.
The finished product from those holes drilled yesterday. We’ve moved the life raft onto the top of the pilothouse roof. To launch it from its previous location required lifting it over the rails, now I just have to push it off the roof.
There appears to have been an ulterior motive to Beloved saying we should move the life-raft to make life easier; he can now look at getting a bigger tender. Peter has always lusted after a center console jobbie.
Not that I want the conversation to be about me, but…
The new tender will hopefully be better than the one I am sitting in taking this photo; with a fuel tank full of water, up a creek, tied to a mooring, waiting for the tide to turn, as I can’t row against the current. There is a pleasant breeze and I am catching up on my Spanish while I wait for Peter to realise that there is more water than fuel in that tank and leave the poor engine alone. He can be a determined little bull dog, but in this instance we will be rowing home. It took me 45 minutes (we may have had a ‘discussion’, and I may have gotten a bit riled and decided I ‘wanted’ to row all the way home). But we got back home to a nice cup of tea and perusing tender alternatives. I have put in a request for a padded driver’s seat, as I have a blister on my derriere.
The supplier is making them to spec at the moment as they can’t get fully completed ones into the country for a while (covid supply disruption and now two of their containers are stuck in Ukraine – it’s a strange world we live in at the moment).
Peter is trying to fit the shape of a new tender onto the top of the boat. I told him his new tender looked a bit flimsy. We finally realized that it was pointless trying to use the existing supports and instead arranged the tender so that it sticks over the back but runs straight along the boat midline – beautiful geometry, but it means drilling more holes into my roof.
Port Douglas is a vibrant little tourist town. In the photo above you can see the huge Cats that do daily tours out to the islands and reefs and loaded with tourists. Every morning, I hear the stewards announcing over the very loud PAs that sunscreen is available freely, and every afternoon I see red blobs of humanity waddling along the pontoons hoping that the pain will result in a killer suntan (maybe they are correct there, but not in the way they hoped for).
Every afternoon Peter takes me walkies – yay.
The tourist junk Shaolin heading back in to Port Douglas after her sunset tour. We see her nearly every day on our walk around the headland. What you can’t see are the Godzillions of midgies. Peter is a boy from the 70s and likes the chemical certainty of Aeroguard (to his credit, he was one of only a few of his management team who didn’t end up with malaria during his years working in Africa). I prefer to waft around smelling of eucalyptus and lavender (‘Mozzie Stuff’ is Aussie made, smells lovely, is packed into a lovely moisturizer cream AND WORKS).
Peter has mixed it up and found a different route. This one is longer, but it is a flat walk along the front beach. I love the patterns formed by the crabs with their little balls of excavated sand; the beach is completely covered with them.
Apparently Peter is not a diabetic on Sundays when he keeps visiting the Doughnut Shop at the Sunday market. In fairness, he works it off with a long bike ride later (and that really does keep his BGLs down). The plain vanilla doughnut is enough for me. Duke’s Doughnuts are that lovely textured and slightly soured dough that they should be – it’s the toppings that will kill you. They are very popular and are usually sold out by 10am.
We went fishing for some friends who had lost their bike. I was successful first attempt!
The salt water had already started on the gears, but a local lad said he’d take it home and clean it up so he could ride to school – works for us. I’m thinking there are a great many bikes rusting away at the bottom of marinas.
To keep the Mothers occupied (and using their tech) we did Family Photo Competitions, with different categories, for a few weeks. “Your task, should you wish to accept it, is to post a photo on the theme of Green. The winner will receive a packet of seeds.” (Always good to include an incentive – hehehe). The Mothers took the challenge far too seriously, anyone would think they don’t have anything else to do.
My contribution was of potential green – mangrove seeds floating away hoping to find a new home. My sister, Rover, won that one with her photo of a carpet snake that was handed into the surgery (she is a veterinarian).
The theme for this photo was ‘Man-Made’ [That term annoyed a number of the feminists in the family, and there are a lot of us, but the derivation is from the Latin ‘manus’ for hand, as in Hand Made and not a natural feature. While it’s not actually gender specific, it is worth noting that the term Man Made has come to refer to more industrial items and Hand Made is of a more crafty nature). Dotty won with her Man-Made and Woman-Laid photo of her new patio. Kathleen who was acting as my impartial judge (she’s currently an expat in India, but happy to help out – the wonderfulness of technology), anyways she awarded Dotty the prize, citing paving skill and bloody-minded effort.
My sister Jen sent in this photo of a beautiful Heliconia, but I thought she must have lost the theme in translation.
Then she sent us the whole photo and the Man Made counterpoint was pretty much in your face. She sees a lot of that kind of thing in Laos. She is currently enjoying a four-day holiday for International Women’s Day – Go the Laotians, and I thought Australians were the kings of holidays.
Back to boating, when The Macs called to say that they needed help getting their generator out for an overhaul, I promptly volunteered Beloved.
The genset is normally below that floor (currently covered in protective boards). Peter and John thought they’d best check the cylinders to make sure their diagnosis was correct and it was – two of the cylinders were in dire need of re-machining. So, the rest of the day was spent lifting the genset out of the boat, rolling it up the marina ramp and then (with the assistance of a handy tree) lifting it into the back of a ute. It took 3 hours, but went very smoothly considering how heavy the thing is. John had spent the last week building the blue frame on rollers just for this job – and it made all the difference.
BOAT WORKS
Air con service
Repair chip in tender hull
Service life raft and move to better deployment location
Removed stern mounting for stabilizer fins and replaced with fishing rod holders.
NAVIGATION NOTES
Crystalbrook Superyacht Marina/Port Douglas Marina [Rob’s Passage Planner – East Coast Australia Lizard Island to Hobart, R. Starkey, 3rd ed, 2014, pg 76 (marina map)]
