Professional Help

OK, here's how you tell if you're a yachtie or an office drone.  

(Nothing against the office drones among you, of course.  Some of our very best friends work in offices.)

A yachtie, I reckon, will be able to tell what is missing from the engine in the shot below:

Give up?  It's the header tank and injection pump.

(Don't worry if you didn't get the answer - you might not be an office drone, just one of those poet-yachties that you hear about...)

So, anyway, said picture was taken just minutes ago, and it shows the state of our donk after those two really important bits were taken away to some place where they can be made well.

And that also gives you the answer that we've come up with to this winter's much mulled-over question - to replace the donk, or not?

We figure that, at this point at least, new donks are for office drones with steady paychecks.  So we're going to fix two out of the three outstanding problems with the current beast and just get on with things.

I certainly could have taken off the header tank myself, and the injection pump, too, for that matter.  But we decided that this was an instance when a little professional help would be in order, so we had an actual mechanic do the job.

We've had almost no professional work of any kind done on our various boats - I usually just muddle through myself, semi-demi poet-yachtie that I am.  But every now and then you just want to pay someone else to make a job go away.

We always get an incredibly satisfied feeling when we decide to pay someone to cross a cantankerous item off our list.  And then, in our experience, we get a really rotten feeling when the "professional" stuffs the job up for us.

I'm sure that won't happen this time!

South From Alaska - In Ipswich

If you're in the Brisbane area, mark this coming Saturday on your calendar - I'll be giving a talk about South from Alaska at the annual literary lunch for the Ipswich Friends of the Library and Information Service - 10:30, October 6, Ipswich Library, 40 South Street, Ipswich.

Would be great to meet some readers of the blog there!

Almost a Devil

This weekend we set out on a land adventure with a Clearly Stated Goal: to see a Tasmanian devil in the wild.

You might remember that devils are carnivorous marsupials whose population has been decimated by a communicable facial cancer in recent years.  The 20th century extinction of the Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, still resonates with Tasmanians, and the increased risk to this other iconic Tasmanian animal has become a huge conservation concern.  There is also some possibility that the historical inability of introduced foxes to become established in Tasmania was due to devil predation on fox kits, which means that losing devils as a common part of the local fauna could have really really bad implications for all sort of small vertebrates in Tasmania -  a number of animals that have been extirpated by foxes on the mainland are still common here.

Seeing a devil in the wild has become a lot harder in Tassie, and it's something we really wanted to do before we left the state.  So we drove four and a half hours to the northwest of Hobart, into that part of Tassie that is still clearly Tassie.

During the drive our two most-often used adjectives were "bucolic":

And "historic":

Our destination was the Mountain Valley wilderness lodge, in Loongana.  (I'm including the link because we completely loved the place, and think that you should visit.)

We first heard about this place from our friends Luke and Wendy, über-naturalists who made a grand tour of the avi- and herpe-fauna of the Australian continent a few years back.  While they were in Tassie, listening for barking owls and ground parrots, they made a detour to Mountain Valley to see devils - the folks who own the place put out road-killed marsupial carcasses to bring them in.

We shared the experience (and a cabin meant for six) with our friends from Aratika.  You know you really like people when you can share a small space with them (and their kids) without any stress.

While we weren't waiting for devils we were looking for platypus and walking around with the very knowledgeable owner of the lodge, getting to know a little something of the botany and geology of the area. 

The lodge is in a beautiful corner of Tasmania, and the wattle trees were in bloom.

But, alas, no devils for us.  We were a bit cavalier about putting in the effort to see one on our first night, but on the second night we pulled out all the stops - one or another of us stayed up to 3 am, staring out the window at the scraps of wallaby in the front yard.  Our friend Robb got two super-brief glimpses of a very skittish devil, but by the time he had roused us sleepy-heads to take a look, the devil was gone.

So I guess we'll have to try again.