Australia Part1

See the bump? That was our first sight of land after 9 days of pounding. Most welcome, however modest it appears. The guidebook describes the coast here as "uninspiring", which is an understatement. However, after 20 months in the 3rd world we needed some "civilization".

Here's a bit o' civilization in the form of Bundaberg Port Marina, the first marina we'd tied up in since Fiji over a year earlier. Ah, no generator to run, unlimited water and a restaurant serving real potatoes! Paradise can vary at times.

The long building in the distance is a sugar shed; Bundaberg's big industry is sugar cane.

This is the perch used to make the sugar shed shot. The climb was made to retrieve the staysail halyard mentioned earlier, which is why it wasn't done while the boat was rolling wildly in 12' breaking waves. Note the antilike admiral on deck to the right of the foot.

OK, what's the first thing a visitor wants to see in Australia? Well, for us it was real ice cream but most people might think kangaroos.

We spent much of an outing seeking the wily "'roo" but for much of the day only saw "signs" of their presence. One can also surmise from the above that Texas is not the only place where hunters shoot at metallic wildlife.

Speaking of Texas, this is a typical bucolic scene in southeast Queensland. Aside from that fact that all the cows are staring at the photographer, this could be Waxahatchie (actually, they do that in Waxahatchie,too). Nothing exotic around here.

Here the admiral braves the winds at Woodgate Beach. Still no roos...

Aha! Roos, in the wild! OK, not very wild. These welfare cases were the only ones we've seen to date, drawn by the feed in someone's front yard. What you can't appreciate from the photo is that the buck or "boomer" on the right is taller than the admiral by a wide margin. One factoid we gained from a local is that kangaroos defend themselves from attacking dogs by entering a stream then waiting for the dogs to pursue and drowning them by holding them under, not too hard if you're as tall as a man.

After gorging ourselves on junk food and crawling shopping malls filled with exotic stores like Kmart and Target we hauled the boat out of the water after 20 months afloat. We're frankly sick of living aboard and look forward to some time in places that don't smell like diesel fuel and where hot water seems limitless. As usual, the boat has acquired a lengthy (and expensive) todo list for refit, which is made much worse by the very strong Oz dollar. We need a vacation.

What's the worst thing about Australia? Flies! They look like typical flies but they seem to have been left over from a biblical plague. They are very aggressive and will carpet you, all the while trying to fly into your nose, eyes and ears. They are relentless, their only saving grace being that they don't bite. We don't want to think what a sheep station would be like - no wonder the aborigines covered themselves with rotting fish oil, they were desperate.

This is written on a Saturday. Next Tuesday we leave our plastic home for a motel, the first time Capt Hub has spent the night off the boat since Vanuatu about 14 months before....

Continued...

OK, the lines above were written in November 2007. We now continue our narrative in May 2008. What the heck have we been doing for 6 months? Besides a welcome vacation from the boat in the US, we've just been working on the damn boat. And working. Toiling. And spending money, Lots of money. Great quantities. Work, spend - got the picture?

Here Capt hub is working and spending at the same time. The red thingie behind him is a new $10,000 generator, the crane cost $200 and the nice guy Sandy holding the "genset" is $46/hr. The hubster is stupid and works for nothing.

We have been writing these pages on the assumption that only nautical nerds would care about what our hoses and wires look like, and we suspect our readership is underrepresented in that area. So, we haven't had too much to share of late.

OK, hose & wire junkies, here's the engine room with the new generator in place. Note the patriotic colors.

One thing we did do of a touristy nature was visit the nearby Mons Repos ("Our Rest", the former beach house of a sugar magnate) turtle rookery, a narrow strip of sand that sea turtles use as a nesting site. Here we see some newly minted hatchlings, just minutes old, about to take their dash to the sea.

The other thing we did was visit Tasmania. That was the only Oz trip we could afford, both in terms of time and money.

The only other things we did was shop and feed the sand flies. When we wrote our dissertation on the plague that is the Oz fly industry, we hadn't discovered that Port Bundaberg is also infested with sand flies, or "sandies". This is not the gracious, noble sand fly that one finds in New Zealand. The NZ sand fly is large and kind enough to give warning that they are attacking, thus providing the victim with a sporting chance at revenge. No, these flies are true "no see ums", i.e. you have no clue they have bitten you until the welts appear, which will then cause insane itching for a week. After awhile we treated the area around the boatyard as if it were contaminated with Plutonium, as any time spent outside would guarantee a a sandy feast at our expense. We are sure hell is populated, at the least, with sand flies.

Anyway, we finally left on our only cruising opportunity here, which is from Bundy to Darwin.

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