Of course – we are now here for week five.

Whilst the mechanical work has been completed there is still the electricals to sort out.  It seems there is an acute shortage of marine tradesmen in and around Yeppoon.  When one says he’ll be here at a certain time that doesn’t take into any account time for ‘emergency’ jobs that pop up in between phone calls. They must be better paying customers than I am. 

There has also been mentioned that there is a bit more traffic this year than before.  Travel restrictions due to the current Pandemic have excluded international and a lot of Interstate holidays and many people are escaping the big cities and taking to their boats to practice extreme social distancing.  Their boats too need work so the customer base outweighs the available tradesmen.

The electrician has been here twice. The first visit was to get an idea of what needs to be done to sort out the tangle of wires and make it all safe and compliant.  The second visit was slightly longer – despite a late arrival due to an unexpected ‘emergency’ job to attend to.   Being an older boat previous owners have replaced redundant equipment or installed new items.  Consequently, the wiring, in some, places is rather ad hoc and very little has been labelled or is identifiable as to where it goes.  There are/ was, some wires that were no longer connected to anything and were just taking up space in conduits and fittings – most of those are now gone.

Other than removing old wiring some tidying up work has been completed. We do have a nice new MPPT solar controller that we can ‘Bluetooth’ to our phones and monitor the solar input.  There is also a new 2000-watt inverter – partly installed, that will give us a bit of booster 240volt power off the 12v batteries if we need it.  As with any regional area some parts and bits and pieces are difficult to source.  We are now waiting for a few necessary items to arrive from the big smoke before too much more work can be completed.  Thanks to the ability to track parcels we know they are expected to arrive on Tuesday.

So now our plan would be: final installation Wednesday, then head off to Great Keppel Island Thursday before heading north after that – ‘touch wood’, ‘finger’s crossed’ and every other ‘wish us luck’ or voodoo incantation that can be thought of.

Time waiting has not been totally wasted.  Laundry has been done and other small boat jobs completed.  The Spring weather has been wonderful, so as well as beach walks, we made the trek to the lookout on top of the hill that overlooks the marina.  After days of lack of exercise and just clambering around the boat the walk up all the steps to the top of the hill was something of a change, however the view was certainly worth it.

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