Friday 3rd August 2012, and we are still in Coffs Harbour , but it is a beautiful sunny day and the wind has at last subsided to less than 5 knts. However, we have  decided to wait another day for the swell to reduce ( as the next stop is Yamba ) and Julie wants another day working with her stock of beads.

I started the day with the breakfast of champions, ie coco pops,

BEAUTIFUL............ just like a crunchy milkshake

then I spent the morning doing paperwork and  visited the marina office to settle the account. There was another lady on duty , Jasmond, who had the rope incident in her records and wanted to check with Elise before preparing  the account, as they were offering a credit for my wasted ropes.  I told them $100 credit would be ok, and they said they would charge the smaller boat size rate  (all up $195 for the week ), so I left them my mastercard details and headed back to LAST WORD,  and decided to fill in the afternoon polishing and waxing  the flying bridge rooftop. I got so carried away that I also waxed the pilothouse rooftop.

I had some time to kill so i decided to take a look at the Vetus rudder sender unit, as the rudder indicator has been playing up during the trip. The rudder indicator works fine for small turns, but frequently goes haywire and rotates counter clockwise to the stop position at 12 oclock every now and then, and sometimes stays there. It has been doing this for some time , but is getting worse....so back down to the lazz for a look. I ask rear admiral Julie for some assistance so I do not have to keep running back to the pilothouse to test the rudder indicator after making different adjustments down below.
Nothing seems to work and i suspect it may be the potentiometer . I even dismantled the actual sender to check for loose wires inside the brain, but no luck. I did not have an installation manual for the rudder sender , and did wonder about plugging the lead wire ( not the hard wired power wires ) into one of the other two ports, but decided not to without talking to someone or downloading the installation manual first, as I  thought "a rudder indicator  part of the time is better than no rudder any of the time".
Well no luck there today. Further investigation another day is ok by me, as I still have the auto pilot with a rudder indicator. It's just that I prefer the real rudder indicator ( with the outline  of the boat ) than looking at bars appearing and dissappearing.


With my unexpected cheap weeks accommodation at Coffs marina, rear admiral Julie and I decided to lash out and try our third restaurant at Coffs
Yes folks we are eating our way up the NSW coast to the Whitsundays.

We decided to try the Italian pasta restaurant , Fiasco, near the local shopping village and  were not dissappointed. There was a big crowd due to the race day at Coffs, and everyone was well dressed and there were plenty of delightful  "fascinators " about. However, we asked to be moved to a quieter table when a group of ten blokes took a table next to us and we had trouble hearing our own diatribes of sotto voce. They were initially offended , but we said we would return.
The food was fantastic, and yes we did return and ended up joining their table for an hour or so. They explained that consensus was that I was about to propose to Julie, and needed a quieter table.

We strolled back to LAST WORD watched some of the Olympic coverage then  prepared for the early start the next morning.