Mike orders a hire car for tomorrow – we are determined to see a little bit of the Northern Territory while we are stuck here.
We take the dinghy to the beach then have the usual fight to lift the outboard motor up before it hits the sea bed. Mike can only manage this by getting in the water and lifting it from behind – it is so badly corroded. I hang onto the dinghy to stop it floating away, looking all around me for salties while Mike goes to get a trolley to pull it up the beach.
We get the bus into town just as it starts to rain, and boy, does it rain. It’s absolutely torrential and as we wander around town looking in art galleries and shops for Aboriginal art, we run from bit of shelter to bit of shelter. We see a painting which we both like but there’s a few galleries which are shut and I would like to see those before we definitely choose one.
Although it’s a Saturday, we are amazed to see that most things shut early and there’s hardly anyone around, just the mad ones like us braving the elements.
We run into Bob and tell him that we’ve hired a car tomorrow and invite him and Maggie to come with us. Hopefully they will but they have a lot of work to do on Ocean Jasper before they leave next week.
We have a great meal at an Indonesian snack bar. Nearly all the food has gone so the owner loads up our plates with a huge pile and then sits down and chats to us for a while. What a sweet man.
Eventually the rain starts to clear and we catch the bus back to Fannie Bay. We go through the hard slog of getting the dinghy back onto a trolley then pushing the trolley down to the water and getting the dinghy off again, then returning the trolley up the ramp. Why is everything to do with boats so bloody difficult?!
When Mike puts the generator on all is well and the air conditioning works, but then he switches on the water maker and it hardly produces any water. Bloody hell. Now what?
Pissed off because he really didn’t want to do any boat maintenance today at all, He goes down into the engine room to investigate and discovers that all the filters are filthy and one of the filters was allowing air in creating an air block. We change some filters and clean others out. An hour later when he switches it on again, it produces water. Hurray. He dumps the old filters over the side, tied on with bit of rope – this gives them a really good clean when we sail.
As I sit at the back of the boat filling water bottles, I watch the beautiful evening sky over the peaceful anchorage. In the distance the smoke from the controlled fires and the lights of Darwin look pretty as it gets darker.
Photo: Smoke filled skies make for beautiful colours
Photo: Sunset over Fannie Bay – again!
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