Year 3: Shop ‘Til You Drop
Date: Thursday, May 8, 2008
Weather: Beautiful, Warm Days; Cool Nights
Location: Bundaberg, Australia

We are preparing as quickly as possible to leave Bundaberg on Saturday morning and start our 2,000 mile trek to Darwin. So today was provisioning day. We rented a car here at the marina that is about 15 miles from town. We got an early start as I wanted to make a Skype call to talk with our grand baby Sam before his bedtime. Strange that our early morning is evening on the East Coast of the US. Gerry and Donna of Scot Free II went into town with us and we were in town and in the internet café
shortly after 8 AM. It’s only been three weeks since we left Sam in New England, but he looks so much taller than he did then. He’s losing some of that baby fat and starting to look so grown up. We can’t imagine what he is thinking when he sees us on the computer screen, but he does kiss the screen when we say goodbye, so we are hoping he knows those strange people on the computer screen are the same ones that spent the winter with him. We also talked to our son Justin and his wife Jo in New
Mexico, my sister Patsy in North Carolina, and to Paul and Marie Miller in Oregon. I was so glad to be able to thank Paul and Marie for all of the wonderful goodies they left aboard Windbird when they left Australia. They seem to be enjoying their new life on land, but as I said in yesterday’s log, we will really miss them as we cruise this year.

After the phone calls, we started the shopping frenzy. We are a thousand dollars poorer at the end of the day, but we have a boat full of food and drink that should take us through the next two months. That is how long it will take us to reach Darwin. If it were possible to do the two thousand miles in one passage we would be there in about fifteen days, but since we will be negotiating our way through the Great Barrier Reef long passages are not possible. We will be doing a number of overnight
passages at the beginning of the journey and once we reach the northern tip of the east coast of Australia, we will be doing longer passages as we near Darwin. But for now we will take one day at a time.

Shopping is just the beginning of provisioning a cruising boat. Once you get back to the boat with all the food, you have to find space to store it away. In terms of cruising boats, we have a lot of storage space on Windbird, but much of it is not as easily accessible as I would like. So as I write this log, there are still many bags sitting in the main cabin waiting to find a home. Our freezer is almost full. The bottom section of the freezer currently contains four pounds of butter, eight
pounds of ground beef, six pork chops, six Porterhouse steaks, eight beef sausages, and twenty chicken breasts. The top layer has three pounds of bacon, more sausages for barbecuing, two packages of English muffins, one package of whole wheat dinner rolls, and about a dozen whole wheat buns. Tomorrow I will add the ice trays and the freezer will be totally full. The refrigerator is bursting at seams with fresh veggies, cheese, and eggs. When we provision in the out islands we are able to buy
the vegetables and eggs before they have been refrigerated. When that is the case, we leave them in plastic bins in our forward berth until they are eaten or desperately need refrigeration. There is also a fresh food market here, but it is only on Sundays so we will miss that. The vegetables from the in town grocery stores are refrigerated, so we have to keep them that way.

Tomorrow our priority is to get our sails back from the repair shop and get them back in working order on Windbird. While Mark is doing that, I will make granola and get the remainder of the provisions stowed away. At that point, we should be good to go. I’m sure we’ll think of many other things we “must do” tomorrow, but our hope is to get them done and be ready to sail out of here on Saturday morning.