Thursday 13 August 2009

A day in the Adelaide River

We stopped for the night at Cape Hotham which was a welcome rest after the boisterous sail through the Dundas Straight with 25knots of wind against tide. The anchorage was so nice and the Adelaide River was close by we couldn’t resist delaying the hustle and bustle of Darwin for one more day. We headed down to the Adelaide River for a spot of fishing and a bit of this and that.

People often ask us how we occupy our time and don’t we get bored. We’ve sailed 2,600nm or 4,630km in 122 days averaging about 5 knots. That’s about 500 hours of sailing or about 65 days using an 8 hour day. That has left 57 days free, so apart from the sightseeing, exploring, hiking and fishing – what else do we do?

This morning we awoke to a breakfast of bacon and eggs topped with fresh chives and truffle oil, served on freshly baked bread. We followed this with a bit of hand washing, the equivalent of 2 machine loads including linen and towels. This takes about 2 hours. Simon then embarked on a repair job on the spinnaker pole – the job was planned to take about 1 hour – ended up to be a little more problematic than first thought and took most of the day. Between helping Simon I baked some custard tarts which included making the pastry bases, set up a seedling experiment in the hope of having more fresh herbs, tended to our garden, we have a lovely new tomato plant thanks to our friends at Elcho and wrote a four page list of supplies we need to get in Darwin. We played electrician in the late afternoon in an attempt to delay a mast climb to look at the mast light. We then enjoyed the sunset while BBQ’ing and half-heartedly fishing. We were showered and in bed by 7.30pm reading our books – Si says all in the name of power conservation but to honest all this fresh air and sunshine is tiring and we have an early morning rise to get to Darwin before dark.

This time tomorrow we’ll have finished our across the top adventure and will be re-stocking for our next leg – the Kimberlies.

PS – I’d love to post a picture of the big barra we caught, but it was so big we threw it straight on the BBQ.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Just think of all that extra baking you could do if you had a washing machine!

Amanda said...

Those tarts look great, mate!
Thanks for making me jealous about your scrummy brekky.