October 23

We left for New Caledonia on October 12^th and encountered strong winds coming directly from where we wanted to go. We bashed along for 8 hours and then decided that we didn’t want to go there that badly. We set course for Australia on a easy reach and had the most pleasant 7 days of sailing. We had some tense moments because we thought we were a bit short on diesel fuel but we had plenty. We caught a delicious Yellow Fin Tuna- yum! We spent a great deal of time in the cockpit enjoying the lovely weather and teaching Jonah silly games like 20 Questions. We chose to enter Australia at Bundaberg as it is a fairly straight forward entrance and we wanted to make port before it was Jonah’s birthday.  

The Custom official was a great guy who mentioned he had two kids (boys!) so we invited them to the party. The next day after arriving we rushed into town and got fixings for a BBQ. The marina lent us an awesome gas BBQ, a tent, table and chairs. We set it up on the lawn and had a lovely time. Jonah had a great time. He adored all his presents – we were fairly successful in the selection. I decorated the cabin with streamers and balloons and he loved that.  

The marina is brand new so the facilities are wonderful. The down side is that there are no kids currently here. I keep hoping a boat will come in soon with kids. We are a bit far from town but they have a free shuttle into town which is handy. We are going to stay here for a couple of weeks and get a bunch of boat work done here. The prices are a bit lower than where we are going to be staying for the rest of the season – Mooloolaba. Mooloolaba is a chi-chi resort town near Brisbane . What makes it nice is that the marinas are all downtown and the beach is right across the street. In addition, there are lots of kids there as cruising families pick the town because you don’t need a car. We think we are going to skip getting a car and simply rent a car when we want to travel somewhere.  

It is very windy here today and the boat is heeling over in the slip!