14th May - anchor winch fixed - shopping - leaving Cairns Blue Water marina

Tuesday 14^th May

Here is a very thrilling photo – the replacement anchor winch remote has arrived!  Bigger and better and brighter than you can imagine!

This means we can leave this morning…maybe…

We spent most of yesterday whizzing around a plethora of shopping malls and light industrial areas from one end of Cairns to the other.  We ended up with:

•       A printer/scanner/copier so that we don’t have to beg other more provident people to scan our documents for us

•  A mouse GPS – such a nifty little thing it deserves its own photo.

•       A lot of food

•       A lot of wine and beer      A new mop to make my anti-mould exercises a bit easier

•       Tarpaulins to make sunscreens on deck

•       New plastic containers for fuel (yellow), diesel (red) and water (white)

•        Two permanent marker pens to mark our fenders and fuel bottles – they took a lot of searching, strangely…

And why kittylitter, I hear you cry?  Our new Marina Friend Barbara, from Hawley Beach, has given us a wealth of information, including the fact that kittylitter is very good at absorbing moisture. I now have three little containers, strategically placed, which MAYBE will reduce, or even remove, the mould problem entirely!

Rosemary called in, with the Weekend Australian for us, and stayed for a last PeteGin.  And Tim and Barbara came for a drink, and then chicken curry, in response to an anguished plea from me – Pete was having terrible trouble downloading his new computer program which will make navigation all that much easier, on the Indonesian Rally.

So it is still all very social, in Cairns, and we are going to miss everyone when we finally get up and moving NORTH.

I think I will include one last Blue Waters marina photo.  From now on, they tell me, it will be turtles, fish, crabs, tropical islands of extreme prettiness, and…maybe too many crocodiles…

I set the trip metre in the courtesy car on our shopping extravaganza and found it is nearly 6 kilometres to Smithfield Shopping Centre, where I walked on Saturday, in mercifully cool weather.  Absolutely couldn’t do it on a day like today, which is already blazingly hot and sunny.  Barbara said she walked there too, and that Tim said she shouldn’t cross the Captain Cook Highway – three lanes whizzing past both ways.  Instead she should trot through a big pipe/drainage ditch.  She did this a few times until it was reported in the news that they had found a crocodile – not a big one, only a metre or so, happily disporting itself in said ditch.