Day 192, Year 2: Windbird Makes the Boule Semi-Finals
Date: Friday, November 2, 2007
Weather: Very Sunny and Very Warm
Location: Bundaberg Port Marina, Australia

Early this morning I heard Peter of Dutch Touch saying he hadn’t been in a quarter-final competition in a quarter of century. Well, Mark and I have never been in a quarter or semi-final competition for anything, but today we we made it with beginner’s luck. We were dreading our 9 AM boule game against Paddy and Alison on Zfarse. Alison is from Australia and has played boules all of her life and Paddy seemed enthusiastic about winning. They explained the rules of the game to us, and right off
I found that I had a knack for getting my silver boule ball closest to the white ball–the goal of the game. We won the game 11 to 8. So on we went to the semi-finals. Our afternoon game time was 3:30, so we had to stop right in the middle of some major projects to go back up to the lawn to play. This time our opponents were Bob and Dianna of White Swan. Again, they have boule balls on their boat and have played on the beach many times. We were just anxious to get the game over with so we could
get back to work. But once again, we won. This time the score was 11 to 3. So tomorrow is our big day. We had such a good time playing today, but then playing is always more fun when you are winning.

Before going to our 9 AM game, we cleaned out the space under the v-berth taking all the extra lines and spinnaker sail up on deck to dry out any dampness. Mark then emptied the anchor locker of all anchor chain and rope and put these things down on the pier to be cleaned. I took down all of the plastic side curtains around the cockpit, as well as the sunscreens, and worked to scrub these clean. I also washed some of the lines that were particularly dirty. All of this took most of the day, but
by time we headed up to dinner, We had the side curtains down inside the boat ready to pack away, the anchor resting nicely in a clean anchor locker.

Tomorrow we take the things we want to sell to shore, play in the boule semi-finals, and attend a Port-2-Port Pot Luck dinner. I’m hoping to sand and maybe even put one coat of varnish on the cockpit combing, so it will be another jam-packed day here in Aussie Land.