Another long deep sleep last night and we're firing on all cylinders today. The sun is out and we have only a few minor boat jobs which will wait until tomorrow. We dropped into Marine Corail, the chandlery, and found Lynn from Wombat's favourite boat shoes, seemingly available nowhere in the world but Noumea, so we snapped up a pair for her (and a pair for Shauna!) and will send them to Wombat in Virginia later today.
Several boats around us have some significant problems. A Lightwave cat in the next berth found to his horror that the tabernacle for his deck-stepped mast was basically in two halves - cracks in the welds right around the join between the top plate and the body of the fabrication!!!! A new one with reinforcing struts all around was made by the manufacturer and couriered to him - it looks up to task, unlike the original..... He has also got an issue with his headsail furler which has resulted in a significant tear in the head of the sail (possibly related to the instability of the afore-mentioned situation). So the rigger and sailmaker are coming to help him today.
A big (80ft) motor cruiser is leaving from next to us this morning, bound for Brisbane. They will almost certainly run into a low forming off the South Queensland coast on Monday - their Wx predictions don't show that but it shows up on all our sources so we hope they don't have too hard a time of it - at least in a huge motor cruiser with twin 1700 HP CATs they can outrun anything that pops into their path albeit at a cost of 350 L of diesel an hour.
We hear that things have been quite wild weather-wise at home - big winds, big rains, big seas, and more coming next week. "Sunrise" are still waiting to get away from Coffs to come over here - how lucky were we to get off when we did; even though it wasn't an ideal passage, at least it was do-able and tolerable!
Just letting everyone know, we will be here in internet land for at least several days until Monday next week, so it is a good time to flick off the emails etc. Skype here seems next to impossible most of the time, but give it a try if you want!
Cheers from us.