Bring Home the Bacon

We were due to leave Port Jackson today but we’ve decided to stay on another couple of days & leave on Friday. After a mediocre Easter, the weather has settled again, the sun is shining, the people are gone and we have the best site overlooking the perfect beach with the best views & amazing sunsets; why would we want to leave?

We were going to Waikawau Bay, another DOC camp on the east side of the peninsula but while it’s beside a beach, the camp ground is tucked in behind the sand dunes so you don’t get the views that we have here or the easy access onto the beach. 

 

We are also just about out of essential food (that includes wine! :) ), our tanks; both grey & black need emptying & our fresh water needs to be topped up by a hose which would save David having to cart containers across from the tap down the way a bit. But most importantly we need to fully charge our house batteries. We’ve managed reasonably OK on solar power for nine nights, in fact better than we’d expected, but the solar has only really topped the batteries up enough to get us through the evening before they drop right down again & we hope desperately that it’ll be a sunny day in the morning. 
 

David has become a train-spotter, in fact I think he’s always been a train spotter but now I know for sure. He religiously watches all the gauges, reading them up & down as it happens. We’ve had to carefully watch our water & power use, switching off anything not required (of course) & having very short showers using bursts of water. We have even been having a few cold showers in the campgrounds outdoor cubicles and using the camp toilets(long drops) a few times too, not knowing yet how long it will take to fill the black tank. There are no dump stations up here so we’ll have to wait until be head south again before we empty. 

We’ve still managed to charge our phones(not that we can access the network too often), I can charge my laptop a couple of times a day using the inverter which has enabled me to process my photos & write the blogs which I’ll be able to upload once we get back into internet range again. And we can still watch TV in the evenings which is a bonus considering most of the camp have gone to bed once night falls.

When we leave on Friday we’re going to head back to White Star Station for a couple of nights, plug in to grid, catch up on business & the internet, buy a few stores in Colville to see us through until we get to Coromandel township & the Four-Square to buy more. We’ll probably take another trip over to Waikawau but head up to Port Charles & Stony Bay and maybe do the other half of the Coastal Walk from that side. But we’ll see, we might just blob for a couple of days.

This afternoon David set out across the bay in the inflatable again, this time with an outboard helping out and after four hours and many fish later he brought home dinner! Fish two nights running, this is becoming a nice habit.

More photos here of  Port Jackson

A couple of nice pannies