In Darwin for a few days

After spending the night in Fanny Bay we have booked a marina berth in Bayveiw Marina, the marina is 7 miles away and you have to navigate thru moorings and boats in the middle of the channels, to say that the waterways are a shit fight here is an understatement... there is no real structure with regards to boating in the Northern Territory you don’t have to register your boat up here and you can get pissed and still drive your boat, I have no doubt that this will change as the population grows.
Because the tides are so radical all the marinas have a lock system which you have to go through and this can limit your options if you have a deep draft or wide beam as I do with Nightmoves, for instance Bayveiw has a 7.400 metre wide lock but is only 3.400 metres deep over the whole marina. Now Nightmoves is 7.100 metres wide that gives me .150mm either side to get in, the lock is constructed of concrete walls without any rubbing strips to protect you from making a mistake.
The skills of one’s capability in staying online are soon tested, the worst thing is approaching the lock as you think it’s impossible to fit through, we made it unscathed both ways I’m sure the adrenalin helped me immensely, once in we pulled into our berth and had the power hooked up the first thing to turn on was the airconditioner, this proved its worth over the week as every day the temperature was over 30®.
We had a heap of jobs to do from changing oil in the motors to washing, shopping for tucker , buying more fishing gear ,filling gas bottles and getting pissed. I was lucky enough to go to the V8 races in a corporate box with an old friend of mine Peter Bolton and his lovely wife Carol, we had not seen each other for 20 years and it was great to spend the day with them, it seemed like only yesterday that we were creating havoc in Sydney 1989. Great people never change and I hope to spend more time catching up with them in the future.
To get around town our sailing buddies Greg and Kelly from Golden Legend lent us their hippie camper van, Tess and I fitted right in and with Bob Dillon playing on the CD player we were in seventh heaven, of course the van had a couple of quirky things that you had to look out for, always park the van on a hill if you can as the starter motor may not kick in... the other thing is watch out for the sliding side door when opening it as it could fall off... naturally one tries to avoid being caught out but Murfeys law will eventually get you and the door fell off 5 times.
Lucky the door was easy to put back in place and the colourful language that projected from my mouth was quite entertaining for those within earshot.... it took 3 days to complete all our running around and at last we were ready to go, we did the market thing in town on Thursday night what a hoot that was, the tucker was great and the variety incredible, unlucky for me I ended up with MSG. poisoning and suffered a night of the heeby jeebys and bugger all sleep.
So it was time to go, it was sad to be leaving our new found friends Greg and Kelly from Golden Legend, Robert and Tinkerbell from Cognac, we had the last supper at the Trailer-sailor Club in Fanny Bay, after hugs, kisses, smooches and handshakes Tess and I headed back to the dingy, Murfeys law had struck again the tide had receded and the dingy was 40 metres from the water, no way could we drag the dingy that far so I took off the outboard and the fuel tank to lighten the load, a young fellow about 10 gave us a hand to drag the dingy into the water where Tess had to keep the dingy floating while I humped the motor and the fuel tank to the dingy, finally we were on our way back to Nightmoves.
We settled in for the night and started the generator to run the aircon, it was bloody hot and we needed to cool down. After half an hour we shut down the geni and went to bed, tomorrow the adventure begins again.
Cheers R&T

In Darwin for a few days

Darwin, Australia