Today I drove into Bundaberg to pickup our outboard and do a number of errands. While in town, I received a call from the Yamaha dealer saying that my outboard (which he had previously told me it was ready to be picked up last Friday) actually was not yet ready and that they would need a new rubber seal to closer her up. However, they did not have such a seal and it was backordered and would be another two to three weeks before it would arrive. Yipes! There was no way we would be willing to hang around here until that seal came in and I nicely but firmly let him know that. He said that they would call around for a generic seal and see if they could get that. After finishing the rest of my errands, I stopped by the dealer to see what the status was. It turns out that they could not find a generic seal but the mechanic said that he could clean up the old seal and it should be good to reuse. Thus, my outboard should be ready to be picked up tomorrow. We shall see and it better be ready!!!!

Once I dropped my stuff off at the boat, I picked up Mary Margaret and we returned to Bundaberg to finish our provisioning. We went to two supermarkets to get all the things we needed and it took all afternoon. By the time we had returned to the boat and had everything put away and inventoried, it was 1730. We were exhausted.

A number of boats start to head out tomorrow. Our neighbors, Julie and Paul of S/V Silver Lining II, moved over to the fuel dock this afternoon to top off their tanks. They will be spending the night at the fuel dock so they can get off early tomorrow morning. We are expecting to see them again at one of the anchorages between here and the Whitsundays. We hope so.

Our itinerary for the next couple of weeks is tentatively the following:

Leave Port Bundaberg Marina and sail to Lady Muscat Island: Thursday, April 19
Leave Lady Muscat Island and sail to Heron Island: Monday, April 23
Leave Heron Island and sail to Great Keppel Island: Tuesday, April 24
Leave Great Keppel Island and sail to Pearl Bay: Thursday, April 27
Leave Pearl Bay and sail to Middle Percy Island: Saturday, April 28
Leave Middle Percy Island and sail into MacKay: Monday, May 1.

We are planning to haul out for a week at Mackay to do a little hull work but even that may be postponed until we get to Malaysia at the end of the year. We shall see.

If you are interested in learning more about each of the places we will be sailing to, you can Google them and/or you can zoom in on them using Google Earth. Each place has a series of pictures that you can click on once you zoom in on them. If you do this, be sure to include the words "Queensland" and "Australia" with the name of each anchorage.