DECEMBER – Still in Denham!!
MONDAY 1 DECEMBER
Well the news is a little better today, although those two engines turned out to be unsuitable, so Geoff has decided to just go ahead and work with what he’s got. Betty’s engine has been hauled out and inspected. The head has a dirty great split in it and one of the pistons has seen better days. The crankshaft is OK and Geoff and his team will all be working on her for the rest of the week. Hopefully we can be on our way at the weekend.
Unfortunately this now makes us likely to be about three weeks behind schedule – not that there was much of one, but it looks as if the country south of Perth with have to wait for another trip. We’ll head straight across from Perth to Kalgoorlie and then down to Norseman and across the Nullabor. We had hoped to be in Adelaide for Christmas but that’s looking less and less likely. We’d already decided to give Coober Pedy a miss, but even so I think we’ll be cutting it a bit fine. The important thing is that we get over to Tasmania at the end of January for the Wooden Boat Show – Jeff’s really looking forward to that and to catching up with a some knotty friends as well as an old school friend who got in touch via the Internet a few months ago.