We started the morning fully unloading the car. This enabled me to load the main table top and take it round to the upholsters to have it traced onto the new fabric. After that I drove to the New World to collect some more bottles of Merlot that passed our previous day’s tasting and to pick up a couple of Chardonnays to prime the tasting pipeline.
After parking the car in the free but further away car park I returned to the boat to get on with some online stuff I needed to catch up on. Helen was progressing with the dark arts of cleaning and sorting out the boat.
One thing I hadn’t mentioned in our blog from two days ago is that we had received some mail while we were away. Two pieces in fact. One was a speeding ticket from the morning we took the boys to the airport and one was a final reminder as we’d passed the due date. So my next chore was to walk into town and to pay off the fine. I was able to pay by Eftpos using my local NZ debit card so with a quick wave of plastic the fine was paid for.
Back at the marina office I checked for our second expected parcel from the US, the one containing our new camera, some accessories and a few other sundry items. It wasn’t there but I did find more mail. I was worried it might be another speeding ticket but it turned out to be a note from customs. I gave them a call and soon it was all agreed that this was personal items for a foreign boat in transit. They were all very polite as usual which is great compared to some of the officials we’ve had to deal with in the past. I emailed them a copy of our Temporary Import Form and that, theoretically, should ease it out of their system.
By lunch we were ravenous as we’d both skipped breakfast. In the afternoon we discovered our first ‘real’ problem – more of a bloody annoyance. I’d left a printer ink cartridge out on the side and it had obviously leaked all over the DVD case it was sitting on and the gel-coat surface beneath. They were both badly stained. The DVD case we couldn’t care about but the surface was a problem. We borrowed some On/Off from Steve on True Companions which made some difference. We’ll try applying it routinely for the next few days to see what we can accomplish. We are having some exterior gel-coat fixes done so maybe we can scrape this off and have new gel-coat applied inside too. Bugger the bother and cost.
The most memorable point of the day came around 3pm. This was my underwater excursion to check and scrape the props. It took me nearly an hour to find all the gear that we’d last used many months ago. 3pm was a good time as the tide had been coming in for 4 hours. The water was still murky but I felt it may be cleaner than an outbound tide with all the liveaboards and fishing boats upstream of us. Also, being nearer high tide there was less chance of kicking up the bottom silt. Finally, at 3pm the sun was still reasonably high to help with the poor visibility.
With Helen keeping and eye out for problems and to assist I lowered by self into the water with my tank on. It wasn’t as cold as I feared but the visibility was less than a foot. I could not even see the rudders from the back step. I carefully made my way forward not wanting to rub against the barnacle encrusted hull. Once I found the rudder I was able to follow it to the prop. It was a mess. There was aboard a cm of barnacle on each face of each blade and a whole mess at the hub. Because we’d been turning the props a lot of the barnacles had been washout out of their shells but were still encrusted onto the props. It took a lot of effort to scrape them all off. Worse still, the gunk coming off the props reduced the visibility further making the whole job trying, particularly as I was also trying to avoid getting my skin scraped off on the barnacle invested surroundings. In the end I came out of the ordeal with barely a scratch. Glad to be connected to shore water I showered for a long time to rid myself of the river ooze.
The boat behind us, Endless, was due to leave to dock at 4pm. Bryan and Jodon from El Regalo were helping out. I shared our experience with them in case they ran into similar difficulties. Forewarned they too found very little action from their props. At one point, when they’d reached the main river they looked like they were having difficulty maneuvering the boat but they managed it. I’ve shared our experience with many others now so folks can take appropriate action.
Once all cleaned up and the excitement over I headed over to Sea Mist to borrow a disk drive with some files on. I was plied with a couple of beers for my trouble (how can I complain). On leaving I ran into Bert on Boree and had a chat with him. It feels like we’ve fallen right back into our old groove.
Dinner was refried left over Chinese from the night before which always tastes better than it sounds. We finished the evening chatting with Rob and Ruth on Albatross III just the other side of the dock from us. Both our boats are work in progress so it ended up with each of us sitting on our own decks and chatting across the divide.
Not all went well. After fixing the first wheel I tested it’s motion (having thought I’d done this before drilling all the holes, applying all the goop and screwing it on). I found it wouldn’t extend below without jamming against the bottom of the dinghy. I had to quickly remove everything before the goop set and fill the four holes I’d made. Very messy. I eventually fitted both wheel satisfactorily and they seem to work well. From the picture I took afterwards it looks like the right hand wheel is a little wonky. It shouldn’t make much difference but it’ll probably bother me forever.