Out on the water

In our first day out of the marina we saw a lot more of Australia: wild kangaroos, a wallaby with a baby, a ship wreck, colorful beatles, an abandoned leper colony, and more. We anchored off from Peel Island, just a few hours sail from our 'home' port of Manly. Maia turns out to be very well behaved at anchor, more great news. There is one draw back though, her water tank sloshes around very loudly right under where Evvy and Craig sleep, which will take some adjustment. It is good that Maia is otherwise good at anchor since the wind howled at us for days, providing quite unseasonable weather. The wind is kind of like the Santa Ana winds in Los Angeles where the wind blows off the desert out to sea, except here when this happens the wind is colder instead of warmer. We stayed quite warm though with hot tea, coffee, great home made soup by Evvy, and our first fresh baked bread.

Today the sun came back, the wind lightened and turned South. It was down right hot when we pulled back into Manly. We had to circle back because we departed without our EPIRB (an emergency device). Our plan was to come back to get it in a few days, then head North. While at Peel Island, we received a message that the EPIRB had arrived for us, so today, Sunday we circled back to retrieve it. Unfortunately, the marina sent the package back to the sender in Sydney, hundreds of miles away. So we decided to go North with only our backup EPIRB for now and we will retrieve the more sophisticated EPIRB up the coast. Today was the Queen's birthday, so everything was closed. We hope to get some business done tomorrow (Tuesday).