Darwin....At Last!!

Position - South 12*25'742 East 130849'325
Fannie Bay, Darwin

We have finally made it to Darwin and are now very happily anchored in Fannie Bay just off the yacht club. We arrived yesterday morning around 8am after an overnight trip from Alcorro Bay on Cape don and the night before that we were anchored off Croker Island. Timing the trip from Cape Don was a pretty complicated operation as we had to make sure to catch three different currents in our favour along the way. Luckily Joern off of 's/v Silene' made some detailed calculations and we had a perfect run leaving Cape Don at 2pm which was five and a half hours before high tide in Darwin. Unfortunately the winds weren't so kind and we ended up motoring the whole way starting with 20knots against us for the first four hours and then dropping off to nothing the rest of the way. Jimmy had a bit of a panic when he noticed the engine was seriously overheating and had to take it apart to try and find the problem. We ended up removing the thermostat completely which seemed to work for a while until the temperature gauge was showing it over heating again. However, the engine didn't feel hot so luckily he decided to check the gauge itself and low and behold there was a loose connection!.....at least the engine got a full service in the process.

Anyway we're really excited to be here even though we do have to anchor a mile off the beach due to the 20ft tidal changes. We visited the Mindil Beach Market last night and ate Chinese food listening to live music while watching the sunset and today we've been doing all the fun cruiser things like checking in with customs and applying for our Indonesian Visas. We've even started doing more provisioning at the Coles and Woolworths supermarket lugging huge backpacks and armfuls of shopping onto the bus back to the yacht club....ten more runs like that and we should be ready!!

----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see:

http://www.sailmail.com