Monday 9th October 2023 – Berkeley River - Casuarina Falls

This morning we slept in until 09:00 and had breakfast next to the waterfall. We were both very tired and our bodies needed a good rest. I typed up my blog notes and updated my logbook over a couple of coffee's while Claudia relaxed.

I had spicy battered cod fillets for lunch that were delicious. I then decided to take a look and see what was wrong with the navigation system. It was working 90% fine, but the auto pilot was not getting position data and it looked like the GPS wasn’t working.

I noticed this issue when I painted the boat and after messing around with the seatalk cables some things started working again, but not everything. I'm wondering if the boat has suffered a lightning strike again? The GPS turned out to be fine, but I found a blown seatalk fuse inside the autopilot.

Unfortunately replacing the fuse made no difference. The Seatalk bus seems to be transmitting but not receiving. I wasted half the day on this without fixing the problem, so I packed everything up and we went for a walk to the top of the waterfall to take photos.

There is a track up the steep scree slope to the top of the gorge, then a nice easy 30 minute walk around the top of the cliff to the dry river bed. There was just enough water flowing to have a cool shower under the waterfall below.

After admiring the spectacular view and taking a heap of photos, we then walked up stream to three large, beautiful ponds and we went for a swim in two of them. The water was clean and cool, and we stayed in the water for hours relaxing and feeding all the native fish.

Later that night the midgies got really bad, so we locked ourselves in the saloon again and had beef rendang for dinner and I had some of last night’s wine.

Track Sirocco’s progress

https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Sirocco