Day 61, Year 3: Work Day on Windbird
Date: Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Weather: Windy, Windy, Windy
Location: Fannie Bay, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
All work and no play for Mark and Judy today. Mark started out early by going to town with Tim on Rendezvous Cay to get LP gas for our cook stove and gasoline for our dinghy. The ride from our boat to the Sailing Club is a good mile or more and just going in once a day is using up the fuel fast. It was really windy all day and there was quite a chop in the anchorage, so Mark’s ride in and back out was quite rough. I wrote a couple of emails and then spent a frustrating time not being able to
send them. We are having a lot of trouble getting our emails sent from here. We can send early in the morning, before 7:30, and from sunset to about 7:30 and that is it. Twice we have had to wait to send our log early in the morning as we could not get it out of here at night. The wireless internet at the Sailing Club was also not working today, so not much of anything was sent out of Fannie Bay today. I did laundry and started polishing stainless. It was long past due, but we just haven’t
had calm sailing days when I could get out on deck and do while underway, and we haven’t stopped long enough anywhere to get work done. I got the whole starboard side done today, plus the bow pulpit. So I am more than halfway done. Mark spent the early afternoon drilling holes in our dinghy to attach the new dinghy wheels. We only have battery-powered drill and of course, the batteries weren’t fully charged. So he had a bit of a frustrating time with that, but he did get the job done. He then
went to work installing our new printer. I didn’t finish my stainless work until after 5 pm and when I got downstairs in the main cabin, I found a very frustrated Mark. He had spent all afternoon trying to get our new printer to “talk” to our wireless print server. But they don’t seem to like each other. If they did, we could keep the new printer on a shelf in the aft cabin where a printer has been since we started living aboard. But since this new printer is not cooperating, we have had to
move it into the main cabin closer to the computer so they can be hard-wired together. This is not a perfect solution, so Mark might spend another day working on this. If that doesn’t work, we will just live with it as is.
We will head to shore early in the AM and try to make a Skype call to our daughter Heather before Sam’s bedtime. Our 8 am is Sam’s 6:30 pm. He’s pretty tired by that time of day, but otherwise we have to stay in at the Sailing Club until 9 or 10 pm to call him in his early morning. We will definitely do that, but for tomorrow we just want to make contact and see what kind of connection we really have from here. So Sam, get ready for a call from Grammy and Grandad.
