Mike wakes me up at 3 am as we get to a bit that my navigational skills should be able to deal with ie going in a straight line with the engine on and no nasty flappy sails to worry about.
Our Telstra dongley thing suddenly springs into life (it’s been totally bloody useless all across the top of Australia even when we’ve been within 5 miles of land because no bugger seems to live there so there have been no mobile signals) but now it can redeem itself. And it does. I publish loads of blog and use my e-mail and Skype. Bliss!
In the distance I can see the smoke from controlled fires – they have a lot of those during the dry season.
I wake up when we are about 4 miles out of Fannie Bay (what a name) and with just under an hour until we anchor I go back to bed wondering what the chances are of me falling asleep now, just to be perverse. Nil as it happens! Motoring into the bay, we can see that there are lots of boats around and quite a few of them have no lights on so we decide to anchor quite a way out.
We both go to bed, Mike falling asleep almost immediately, and me, well obviously I don’t. I am lying there when I hear the anchor alarm go off and shove Mike out to investigate. It turns out we are just swinging a bit. I am almost drifting off when I am aware of footsteps on the boat, then banging on the door. Pest control are here to carry out a hull inspection with a diver – they won’t let you in to any of the marinas until they have shot all the salt water inlet pipes with disinfectant. While we are chatting, the inspector warns us off going to any of the northern shore beaches as they are closed due to an outbreak of e-coli. Apparently they just pump raw sewage straight into the sea from Darwin and rely on the 20 feet of tidal waters to deal with it. Nice.
What they don’t tell you about the disinfecting treatment in advance is that you have to leave it in the pipes for 14 hours. This means that for 14 hours we can’t use the engines, generator, toilets or air conditioning. Terrific. Without the engines we can’t move the boat closer to the shore and we are anchored right at the outside edge of the bay with virtually no petrol in the outboard motor so we can’t dinghy to shore. Great. Boat jobs it is today then! Mike starts on his list of things to fix and I do some cleaning.
In the late afternoon we both manage a nap then continue with some more jobs. As it gets dark, the smell of smoke is heavy in the air but it makes a fabulous sunset which unfortunately I am too late to capture on film!
Our position is: 12 deg 25 min S, 130 deg 47 min E
Distance so far: 11987 nautical miles
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