FEBRUARY
17, 2005
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FEBRUARY
17, 2005
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| FINE TUNING |
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We spent Thursday evening at the home of a fellow who works for Seawind. We had asked Brent and his fiancé Alana over to Bella Via for dinner last week and they reciprocated with an authentic Australian barbecue. At the end of the evening, Brent gave us a copy of the Seawind newsletter in which we, and Bella Via, have been featured in a two-page spread. Log on to www.seawindcats.com for the latest issue and read all about us. February 20, 2005 We're still at anchor at Birkenhead Point in Iron Cove in Sydney Harbour as we continue to work out final issues with the boat. We had thought that we might go further up the harbour to another anchorage, however, Paul had some business a short bus ride away so we stayed put for the weekend. It's been raining off and on quite heavily for two days. The boat is nice and dry and quite comfortable. It's Sunday evening, it's raining quite hard, and we're reading by candlelight as we are trying to conserve electricity. This weekend has been all about monitoring the boat batteries, running the engines periodically when the sun is not shining and the solar panels can't do their job, making water through our watermaker (desalinator), and continuing to put together all of the fishing gear. It was also laundry day on Saturday. This means handwashing and rinsing and wringing by hand and hanging the clothes out on the lifelines to dry. It's a most of the day process. We're anchored in quitea posh neighbourhood of Sydney Harbour and this will be the second time I have done a large load of laundry by hand. Paul says that the people here have probably never seen the likes of this kind of activity. There are large boats tied up at the marina across the way and most of them, we have observed, never leave the dock. We actually tried to go to a laundromat a few weeks ago and walked for 30 minutes only to discover that all coin laundromats were converted to private laundry service establishments several years ago. Because we had walked so far and it was so hot, I let the guy do my laundry and sat and read my book as Paul went to a marine supply store. Cost was $21.00. We won't do that again. We're hoping that when we get to smaller countries, that there will be places where we can do towels and bedding - the big items. We also put together a list of what we have to accomplish over the next two months before we head over to New Caledonia: General Boat Maintenance At Seawind Office: Web Stuff We decided after reviewing the list
that we will have a one-hour session every morning with the ham radio in
order to learn how it operates, especially how to receive weather information.
This is a priority as the radio is quite complicated and we certainly did
not learn its use in the ham radio course. Being able to use it for email
as we have been doing is only one of its features.
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