Sarah is flying out with our grandchildren in Newhampshire, USA. They are there with their parents on holidays, Paul and Christine, and their grandfather from the otherside, Christine's father, who traveled over from the Philipppines. His name being Hector, and has suggested that he will visit us on the boat when we get to Bali. We think that would be great, and look forward to meeting him again.
Meanwhile, back in Mackay, it is a beautiful morning for a change, blue skies and light winds.
09.00hrs Chris arrived and with the rigger, they replaced the tricolor light and all the lights on the mast with LED bulbs. The rigger checked the mast from head to toe again and replaced the outhaul for the mainsail. The cost of this was frightening. GOD! getting things done here is mighty expensive.
At lunch time, we drove to Caneland shopping centre, got food for tonight. Aileen doubled up on all the fruit and veg, and we loaded it all into the car, and Niall and myself took off to the airport to return the car.
At the airport, skipper decided to drive into the taxi rank, park beside a taxi and off load all the goodies into the taxi, before parking the car in the return car park, as this was a long way from the taxi's and we did not want to carry all the stuff across the airport.
BUT :-
This traffic police "lady" had other ideas and came flying over to the two of us plonkers sitting in the car and just about to negotiate with the taxi along side. Hey! Hey! Niall swares... I think she has us in her sights, and sure enough, she had! "HEY, MOVE OUT of here, you are not allowed to come in here", she yelled. Skipper tried explaining that we just wanted to transfer the goodies......... ahhhh the witch would not even let us finish what skipper was trying to explain, "Get OUT before I have you arrested, and fined". Skipper gave her as good as he got, but got no where. She was a big ugly, but skipper had to refrain from reminding her about that, so we had to put our tails between our legs and feck off. Niall got out on the pavement further along and took all the goodies, while skipper parked the lovely car, returned the keys and got a taxi, collected Niall and returned to the marina.
By the time we got to the boat, Chris had good news and bad news. He had replaced the Inverter and it was working well. All skipper and Niall had to do, was connect it all up and dismantle the temporary system that skipper had put in place when the Invertor went belly up a few weeks ago. All this took an hour or so, and then every thing worked well...
so we gave Chris and his mate a large G & T, and of course we had one ourselves.
The Girls returned to the boat later and skipper put on the dinner around 17.00hrs. This consisted of a rack of pork ribs, roast spuds, creamed spuds, apple sauce and carrots. It was excellent and we ate dinner in the "Starlight Restaurant" plus the rich amount of wine, which never seems enough at the time, but always too much the following morning... Of course, we had lovely music playing all night, la.la.la.
The new LED lighting is not as good as expected, too much like spotlights, and therefore very black and white lighting. frig...........
We had a lot of chatter to catch up on, so skipper fell asleep in the blinking cockpit, while the rest kept the talking going.
That's all for now.
Signed :- Stephen Hyde (Skipper)