Townsville

We arrived in Townsville on 30^th July, tired but very relieved to have crossed the Pacific Ocean. But then sad that that part of the adventure was over and cruising friends made on the way may never be met again.

Coming thru the barrier reef at night in 30-40 Kts winds and 3.5-4.5 Mtr swells was no walk in the park. The AIS had stopped working 3 days out of Vanuatu, thus we had no info on the ships we encountered.  This I fixed after finding a fuse block badly corroded in the rear Lazerette and replacing it.)
Arriving at the fuel jetty in the Break Water Marina in Townsville for clearance formalities, we were granted temporary import of the boat by both Customs and Quarantine. Customs were very good and helpful, forms were filled out and we were generously allowed 30 days to come up with the 10% duty needed to import her. As there was a considerable amount of paper work involved with this we had a local import broker handle the import for us. Quarantine wanted us to have a full termite/bug inspection done as there is a lot of wood on her, this she passed with flying colours and we can now report that she is a fully imported Australian yacht!!

Our windlass gave us some concerns when we last used her in Vanuatu. Deploying the anchor here in the Townsville pen we noticed that the motor got extremely hot in 15-20 seconds then tripped the 70 Amp CB!! Initially worn brushes were diagnosed but is soon became obvious that the whole windlass was well passed it’s used by date!! So as with most things these days, the same one can’t be bought anymore, so a replacement Lewmar unit  was bought and is at this moment is being fitted. Once this is sorted we plan to depart for Darwin hopefully before the end of August.

Coming home has had mixed emotions. While here we had our Daughter and boyfriend come stay with us so we could celebrate her major Birthday milestone (never a good idea to mention a Woman’s age is it??!!) We also had a dear friend from the yacht club come over for a week. This was very nice but made us even more home sick for Perth.
Jan & I now have iPads, mine has GPS installed so I have downloaded Navonics charts for the whole of Australia and will be using it as a back up to the chart plotter. These things use far less power than the E120 and we met several cruisers who use them as their primary navigation display. There is a company in New Zealand that make a little black box that interfaces with Sea Talk and NMEA to wirelessly transmit all that info onto a iPad, so radar overlays and AIS info can be displayed just like the chart plotter, neat. Check out    http://brookhouseonline.com/imux.htm

We were also shown Chart books covering different parts of the world, very handy to have all charts in 1 large book....Check out http://www.tidesend.com/

So now we are heads down checking charts and tides for the leg to Darwin. Initial inspections show this to be an extremely challenging leg thru the inner Barrier reef, but at least we will have shipping lanes to follow and 24/7 weather forecasts on the internet and SSB.

More from me in Darwin...Mike