LWH – Week 15 : Gove

Sat 13 – Fri 19 Oct
Well I wont bore you with a day by day blow of our time in Gove. Gove consists of an alumina plant and the Gove Boat Club. The water is an incredibly beautiful colour but other than that there is nothing here. The nearest town is Nuhlumbuy about 11km away. You need a liquor permit to be able to buy alcohol at Woolies and we couldn’t get that until Monday and you cannot buy casks of wine – it is bottles only. We have had a couple of meals at the Boat Club which is open from Thursday to Sunday and a lunch at the Walkabout Tavern in the town. We have met a few fellow yachties passing through but they have been able to continue their journeys while we just sit and wait and hope our part will eventually come in and a weather window will open up for us to get across the Gulf. A lovely man came out and found the problem with our water pump. The bronze housing of the salt water pump has corroded and so the metal wear plate isn’t sitting straight and flush against the impellor so it sucks air and not water. He did a temporary repair with sicaflex behind the wear plate so it acts as a flat bedding which may last five minutes, five hours or five years!!! Either way we cannot risk going home without a new water pump. We did however, move a little closer to shore so it is not so far to go in Bob. We hired a ute for the day and dumped the 80 litres of diesel from the deck which we bought in Indonesia (dirty fuel) and have jerried out enough to fill the tank with good fuel. We also paid for our 2 – 3 km tow - $500 – yep!! So add that to the $330 we had to pay to Quarantine and it has cost us $830 before we even set foot on land. – Welcome home!!! We continue to do the radio sked with the boats still in Indonesia and one of them has engine problems up there and we feel so sorry for them. It is bad enough here but at least we are home! We are enjoying the showers and we actually used a washing machine the other day! Wow how easy was that to do the washing! Anyway this is Arnhem Land – homelands and not only do we need a permit for liquor but if we wanted to go anywhere other than town I believe we have to get a permit for that too. Not so much the land of the free up here – in fact not anything like the real Australia where you live. We are keeping ourselves busy – the skipper has been doing a bit of fishing – score 5 reef sharks.

Much love to all
Fair Winds and Calm Seas
Dell and Peter