I got up early to wash the truck and the car and didn't finish until ten o'clock.
I chatted to the Caretaker who only charged me a standby fee and who proudly showed me the new drive-over dump station which the council are installing in preparation for the rally in 2003.
We set off towards Ashby via Coraki and stopped for tea at Woodburn. I walked the length of the town, all 400 m of it to find a letter box and of course it started to rain.
We arrived at the Kerrs at about two o'clock, parked the trailer at the end of the garden, set up the Motley, had tea, and went for a walk in the next door block which they are buying to protect it from development.
The nearest neighbours are insisting that the three big trees that could fall on their house are removed and that is being done, at the present owners expense. This is upsetting Val because the really want to preserve the native habitat which this block of virgin bush provides. Val had asked the tree fellers to check the nest holes in the trees before they felled them. Clearly they understand her concern because one of them rescued a big bearded dragon from the site and brought it to Val to release in their garden.
Notwithstanding this unnecessary assault, the remaining bush will be a wonderful addition to their property. They will have to clear out a lot of rubbish and weeds which have accumulated over the years but there are still many trees including some very old blackbutts and ironbarks.
We went into town to do some shopping and I bought some beautiful red emperor snapper which I cooked in a kind of cajun style for dinner. Everyone was impressed.
I visited the doctor in Maclean because I have had severe pain in both thumbs for some time. The doctor said it definitely wasn't Ross River virus as the symptoms were all wrong. He eventually diagnosed muscle strain probably from the carpet removal episode at Patricks Rd a couple of weeks ago. He gave me some anti-inflammatory tablets. We'll see if they do the trick.
In the afternoon we went to Woody Head in the Bundjalong National Park where Jean, Val and Les communed with the fishes and I communed with the birds.
We enjoyed a very good dinner at one of the Chinese restaurants in Maclean.
This was supposed to be as lay day but several minor repairs came up and I spent the whole morning and some of the afternoon cleaning or fixing things. I also did the laundry.
We went to Yamba to shop for bread and milk and for electrical parts for the Motley from the ships chandler. We had coffee there before visiting the real estate agent in Maclean to make an appointment to view a house advertised in the local paper. As it happened, that house had already been sold but we were given some other addresses to look at.
I started work on the tidying up of the new battery arrangement but I need a big busbar to finish the job.
We were entertained to dinner at the Kerr's and afterwards we watched the film "Chocolat" on DVD.
I spent the best part of the day working on the Motley's 12V system.
In the afternoon we all went to Woody Head and this time I joined the swimmers. I borrowed a snorkelling mask and spent a very pleasant half hour watching the amazing variety of fish.
When in town doing the shopping, we bought snorkels. The visit to the rock pool at Woody Head had been fascinating and we thought that perhaps we would find other places to fish-watch on our travels.
I took a day off from the rewiring job as I felt lazy and in need of some rest and relaxation.
In the afternoon we christened our new snorkels at Woody Head. The fish are amazing. We saw many bream up to about 200 mm (8 in), mullet about the same size, an octopus and a wobbygong resting in a rock crevice. He was disturbed by my presence and turned round so that he could watch me.
There are lots of little fish, pipe fish, stripies, toadfish, butterfly fish, neons, and several other species of tropical reef fish. These apparently are washed down from the reef and died when the water temperature drops in the autumn. There were also beche-de-mere crawling on the bottom.
The pool is quite shallow at low tide but there is easy access from the deeper water and the fish seem to appreciate the warmth and relative calm. The most puzzling thing is how so many species of such different sizes co-exist in such density without any apparent hostility. I guess that none of the fish are prey for any other.
I spent all day working on the 12V wiring. I solved all the problems except one. The switch I bought to act as a power stud has too big a diameter for the lugs on the existing wires. As I don't have a crimp tool, I will have to make some other arrangement or wait till I get back to Sherwood Forest to borrow Robin's crimper.
The Kerrs went to Lismore to shop and to have the car serviced so we were by ourselves.
The weather was light to variable so we were trapped in the Motley.
I tried without success to fix the problems with the Keryn's chapter laptop which has lost some of its files due to a virus or something. I had borrowed a copy of Windows on a CDROM but there isn't enough left running in DOS to even recognise the CDROM drive. The Recovery disk that came with the computer does a reformat and, without a backup, I don't want to trash everything on the hard drive if I can avoid it.
I found some little tasks to do including a test of the mobile phone as a modem using a newly advised Telstra service called Mobile Internet. Lo and behold, it worked. It wasn't the iBook or the Keyspan adapter or the Kyocera software or the cable at all, it was Ozemail all the time! I have wasted a year by not addressing the problem in a proper fashion.
Tests on the Mobile Internet site showed that www works perfectly. The guy at Telstra had said that the site has no POP server and so doesn't support email. I tried Mail Siphon and it worked my account at Ozemail so I tried Eudora and it worked too. There is a limitation which I discovered when I tried to send a message to all the people who had shown an interest in my problem. The server at Mobile Internet bars access to some other servers so I can't communicate with everyone. Still, I have made great progress and am happy that I can read my email while on the road. Perhaps I can get a Telstra Bigpond account of some sort at reasonable cost to provide a full email service.
We went to town to take in some of the Maclean highland games.
The pipe band competition was surprisingly good and the log wrestling, a game where two people hold the ends of a log about 150mm (6 inches) in diameter and 3 m (10 ft long and each tries to push the other out of the circle, the and the farmers walk where contestants carry a pair of very heavy weights in the shape of logs, were interesting.
In the evening, we took Les and Val to The Spice Rack for dinner. It was as good as usual and we congratulated Mick who had done the cooking himself because the regular cook was on holiday.