Having arrived in Fannie Bay, Darwin at 3am on Sunday 13th, had a few hours sleep and then in the afternoon went ashore to the Sailing Club to check out all the facilities available and catch up with a few friends over a beer. Catala and us ended up having a meal at the sailing club along with our friends from Marcy. As there is a huge tidal range in Darwin we were actually anchored about 2 miles offshore which took us a good 20 minutes to go ashore in our dinghy and little 2hp motor.

On the Monday morning Catala and us caught a bus into the city, along with quite a few other rally participants as we had to go into Customs, then down to the Indonesian Embassy to organize our visas for Indonesia and off to the Bank to order money. For $A1000 we got 8,228,457 rupiah so instantly became millionaires!!! All in all we spent most of the day in town as we needed to replenish our fruit and vegetable supply as well as do a few other things.

On the Thursday night a barbecue was organized for the rally participants ashore and we all took our own food and on the Saturday night Sail Indonesia put on a barbecue for the participants with free food and a limited supply of drink. Both nights were great for catching up with various ones as we didn't always catch up when ashore as we were all so busy getting things needed on our yachts plus doing repairs. Our only major repair job was trying to fix leaks in the dinghy as one of the seams had come apart. One of the difficulties has been getting the right sort of glue as the original we had has long been used up. Darwin was not really set up for the Rally boats and most places had run out of supplies. Went to get some Vilene filters for the water maker which are just standard filters and even Bunnings had sold out!! The Chandlery places only had the minimum of stock for everything so it proved very frustrating. It is a big event for Darwin every year so you would think the retailers would be a bit more switched on. For a week Catala and us were using our motor and their dinghy as their motor was in getting repaired.

One day Catala and us biked to another suburb to go to Bunnings and a couple of electrical supply places and in all biked about 12km. I thought I had done very well as I haven't ridden a bike for about 15 years!! I might add that I was pretty exhausted by the time we got back.

Did our duty free fuel on 21st - were booked in for 12.30pm and it was 3.30pm before we could go into the fuel dock to fill up. The fuel dock was outside the lock which goes into Cullen Bay Marina and was about half an hour from Fannie Bay. That night we had a pot luck roast pork and lamb dinner on our boat with Musketelle, Keshi and Catala. We made a pact when we were in Gove as Greg on Keshi loves roast pork and Leanne was bought up a Muslim so does not eat it, so I cooked the pork, Barbara on Musketelle roast lamb, Janine did the roast veges and Leanne made dessert. All in all we had a great night.

The next morning we were back in town to pick up our Visas from the Indonesian Embassy and then we had to go to the new convention centre for a Rally information seminar which went from 1pm - 5.30pm. From there we went to the supermarket to start doing a bit of stocking up. Also did the same on Thursday and Friday. All in all it was all go in Darwin as there is always plenty of little jobs that need doing on the boat and unfortunately there wasn't any time to do any sight seeing so will have to come back one day when we have finished our sailing bit and do the land based thing. We found Darwin to be a nice place but it is rather spread out since the rebuilding after Cyclone Tracey.