Well, we've been here almost a month now so have formed some opinions. We would have gone earlier, but had to wait principally for the hot water cylinder to be installed and there are one or two other lesser matters we are attending to ourselves. The other major issue which is unfortunately having an inhibiting effect on our cruising plans is the lack of a working watermaker. The replacement pump we need has to be airfreighted from the US and won't be here until after New Year. We are driving down to Murwullimbah for Christmas and then might go away for a few days on the boat into the Great Sandy Straights/Fraser Is. area but will have to watch the water situation, and when you're used to the sheer convenience of a watermaker it's very hard to do without it because the primary disadvantage is that showers are not possible and in the heat.......!!!! If the guy from Open Ocean Watermakers was here right now he'd be over the side with 2 broken legs!!
We've looked at other nearby marinas to go to for a change but Mooloolaba requires 3rd. party insurance of AUD10,000,000 and we have NZD5,000,000!! We are looking at the costs of increasing it. Berthage rates at Mooloolaba, Scarborough (near Brisbane), and Tin Can Bay are all much the same as here. But it may in fact be better for us to stay here and if the weather settles do what we need to do with the decks before we go to NZ in Feb. Then we'd be free to have some shakedown cruising ahead of the sail north to Darwin after we return here in March because that's going to stretch us - nearly 2,500 miles in 12 weeks means being constantly on the go. The other way to tackle that is to miss large swathes of the coast and do a series of 3-4 day passages outside the Barrier Reef to improve our daily distance average. It all needs careful planning. And we need to haul out for antifouling at some point as well! But for now...........
The marina - there is everything here that we need with a hardstand just adjacent. There are all the services that one could need there as well. Although they are expensive; the electrician's hourly charge-out rate is AUD99 (NZD125)!! In NZ it's around half that. In spite of that they are all busy and there are waiting times to get work done. So, where possible that's an incentive to do as much ourselves as possible. Other than that the marina has a restaurant, a good chandlery, 2 fish shops and the office which has an ATM and the staff are extremely obliging. Faxes, photocopying, downloading and printing from the internet are all there. As regards the internet, once we got used to Telstra's peculiarities we have excellent access. And we have a phone! Sometimes it gets a bit jobbly in the marina as a chop can build up in the river so we have put rubber shock absorbers on our mooring lines to stop any "snatching" that had been happening when the boat pitches or rolls and which tends to wake you up in the middle of the night! Not that it's ever been a serious concern.
The nearest civilisation from here is Burnett Heads (2 kms away) where there is a small supermarket, P.O., chemist etc. And a pub!! The supermarket and the pub have a free service to bring us back to the marina with whatever we have purchased and on that subject the marina operates a shuttle bus into Bundaberg CBD on weekdays and up to 2 trips on a Sunday to the local market. All free.
On the subject of the market, we have come to the conclusion that here it's only average as far as quality is concerned. Nothing like Noumea which was far and away the best. A little more expensive perhaps but worth it. Here though so many things are cheap - pineapples $1.50 ea., mangoes (which are delicious) $1-$2 ea., cherries $8-$10 per kg., and sweetcorn 4 for $2 - just to name a few. But no pates, saucisses, or the vast array of beautifully fresh fish that we had in Noumea.
The City of Bundaberg is 20 kms away and accessible by marina shuttle (free) or regular bus ($7.20 for 2). The trip is across almost flat country with sugar cane everywhere. It is a pleasant place with a number of well preserved historic buildings and the pubs are especially noteworthy in that regard. It's clean and there are good inexpensive restaurants where one can have lunch for 2 (incl. a beer/wine) for around $30. NZ is generally much dearer than that. And excellent shopping - there is absolutely everything that one could need. There is a fairly primitive marina in the river in the heart of the city but very vulnerable to the river flooding. In last summer's floods much of Bundaberg was under water and one shop we went into pointed to a line about 7 feet up the wall where the water came to. By contrast the Port Marina where we are near the river mouth was quite unaffected although the whole marina floated up quite high. But it's out of the main river flow and the only thing that changes is the water level - just as long as the whole marina doesn't float off its piles!! No wonder they appear fairly high. There is also potential for cyclones but the likelihood of anything this far south is extremely slight.
Just upstream of the marina is the commercial port where they load bulk sugar carriers. It's much smaller than McKay though. That's where we walked the other evening and got bitten by the local midges who breed in the intertidal zone. These are nasty little critters because you can't see them and they actually excrete their body waste onto your skin. This dissolves a small area of skin which then enables them to bite and inject whatever poison they have. It seems quite potent because the itching that results is chronic and large red patches appear on limbs. In our case these are only starting to disappear almost a week later and they easily become septic because the skin is broken. A good insect repellent is a must and then a good antibiotic cream is necessary if you do get bitten. The other defence on the boat is mosquito coils which do seem to work. Insect screens (which we have) are not a barrier to these tiny midges. So we just have to put up with the chemical emissions from the coils. We hardly ever had a problem with any form of biting insect anywhere in New Caledonia but here they are chronic. And then there are all the land based pests like snakes although we are yet to see one. But the Australian Brown and the Taipan are deadly. Then there are the crocodiles which we will have to be well aware of when we go north. Don't know how our rubber dinghy would fare!!
To summarise, Bundaberg and its surroundings seems to us to be bustling and prosperous although most people say that sugar is generally in decline. However, there doesn't seem to be much evidence of any decline.
Local and national politics are volatile here at present and the big news in the past week has been the embezzlement of AUD16M by a Maori New Zealander employed by Queensland Health. Evidently he claimed to be a Tahitian prince!! They would have to be pretty incompetent to allow theft on that scale but it will do nothing for NZ's image here. This has done the state Labour government no end of harm as well and they are predicted to lose in a landslide in the next state elections.
Well, that's enough rambling for now - as always watch this space
Love from us.
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