Day 207, Year 2: Dinner with Good Friends . . . Again
Date: Saturday, November 17, 2007
Weather: Partly Cloudy with Periods of Rain; Rainy Evening
Location: Bundaberg Port Marina, Australia

Varnish jobs have had to be transported inside as it seems to sprinkle rain every single time I start to varnish something outside. So we have our Dorade boxes sitting on the main saloon table and the teak shower grate hanging from the main saloon ceiling. I’ve finished the varnishing of teak trim in the shower enclosure, but I am still working on the aft bathroom floor. By the first part of the week, I should have enough coats on these things to call it quits to varnishing, although I will still
be working on oiling the handrails on deck. I start that process tomorrow and hope to have that done by mid-week. This morning Mark sprayed the spinnaker with fresh water, laid it out on the deck to dry, and then raised it in its ATM sleeve to complete the drying process. It had gotten doused with salt water on the passage here, so we needed to clean it before storing it away. With eight days to go, we ticking off the jobs to do, but somehow the list seems to get longer every day.

I had invited Bob and Dianna of White Swan and Paul and Marie of Ranger to come to Windbird for dinner this evening, but the rain caused a change in plans. There was no way we could all fit in our boat with the varnish projects sitting around and no way to put these things outside because of the rain. Marie invited us to come to Ranger, so we transferred food in that direction. But then there was another big change. We were going to have grilled steaks, but Marie had talked to some of the local
fishermen on the dock yesterday and arranged to trade “XXXX Gold” beer for crabs. She thought she would be getting two or three crabs that we could cook and eat as an appetizer, but we ended up with twelve huge Spanner crabs and they took the place of the steaks. We’ll just have to have those on another evening. The crabs took a little more work than we had expected, but they were delicious. After dinner, we did some pre-planning for our Thanksgiving dinner this week. We will all get together
again on Thursday to enjoy turkey (or maybe chicken) with all the trimmings. We aren’t sure that we can get cranberries here, so Mark might not get to make his traditional cranberry salad, but we will have stuffing and pumpkin pie, and all of the other traditional Thanksgiving dishes.

When we got up this morning, we found that we had run out of time on our wireless internet service. It took all day to get that up and running again so I didn’t get to call our daughter Heather to check on baby Sam. He has had a nasty little cold and we wanted to check on how he is doing. We will have to try again in the morning now that we are connected once again. After that, we will get out the Sail Rite sewing machine and Mark will do a few sewing projects. He needs to restitch the Dorade
box Sunbrella covers and make some modifications to a tarp we bought this past week. We are going to hang it over our boom to cover the cockpit area. We will leave the dodger and bimini Sunbrella covers up while we are gone, but we hope the tarp will help protect them from UV damage. So more varnishing and some sewing are on the agenda for tomorrow.