The Heat is On

We're back in Australia for a few weeks to try and make a start on our long to-do list on Gjoa. We landed at Perth to be greeted with a hot, white sun and a scorching blast of 38C heat, it was a shock. It's moderated somewhat now. We're down to 28C, much better.

We picked up the van from long-term storage and headed north to Carnarvon, a two-day drive. Now that it's summer here, it looked a little greener than when we left, but, the farm fields that are in the south soon give way to the scrubby, red, dry, desert-like landscape further north.We have a/c in the van which makes the drive bearable. The road seems endless and the only thing that breaks the monotony is trying to avoid all the dead kangaroos on the road. We never see any live kangaroos, only dead ones, in great numbers, young ones and old ones. It's very sad and quite distressing to see such carnage, they are such beautiful animals. There are a number of feral goats that seem to thrive in this landscape, but, they seem to be more vehicle and road-aware as we've only ever seen a couple of dead ones. The other thing to avoid are the 'road trains'. Think a normal tractor-trailer size vehicle (HGV lorry) and then add another two trailers onto the back of it. These behemoths can be up to about 40 meters long and they barrel along at full tilt. Sometimes there's no shoulder on the road and it can be 'interesting' when you encounter one coming the other way.

As we're only here for a few weeks, we'll be staying 'on the hard' and not going back into the water until next time. Life on the hard, in a boatyard, is definitely 'hard'. Everything, including us, has to go up and down a long ladder. There's no water, or, operating toilet aboard. The boat is absolutely filthy, covered inside and out in dirt and sanding dust. The wind has been blowing strongly and incessantly for weeks. It picks up the sand, whips it around and deposits it into every nook and cranny. We are surrounded by multiple commercial boats being sanded, painted and fibreglassed and the particles and smells all seem to be blowing our way. At night, it sounds like we're sleeping in a gale and even though you know you can't drag anchor, it still makes for a sometimes unsettled sleep when there is occasional vibration from a wind gust. This is the view from the deck of the boat, we're directly open to the sea breeze, it's been this windy since we arrived.

Despite the hardships, we're glad to be here to finally start executing some of the jobs we have been thinking about and planning while we were away. For this trip, we plan to pull the prop shaft and replace the cutless bearing. This is not as easy as it sounds. Hopefully, the shaft and/or its tube have not been damaged by the loud grinding and clunking noises we were hearing on the way in here.

Next up is to take out the hydraulic ram (the thing that moves the boat's rudder) and hydraulic autopilot pump to have them both rebuilt. Hopefully, this will fix our autopilot problems. This is also not as easy as it sounds. The hydraulic pump is buried in the bowels of the engine room and will require some real estate reconfiguration and engine room yoga to get it out.

A stretch goal is to install our new Racor fuel filtration system that we brought with us from the UK. We will be replacing the old, original Separ system which wasn't working too well for us with all the fuel problems we had on the way down from Malaysia.

After the work, we hope to have enough time to do a mini road trip around the Perth area. We'd like to have gone further north, but, this isn't the right time of year. A lot of the roads are currently flooded around Broome due to the landfall of cyclone Kelvin this week. After the road trip, we'll head back to the UK, hopefully just in time to enjoy some bluebell walks in the woods around Bristol and further afield. There's nothing quite like spring in the UK, it's glorious.