May 2015

We were up early to pack up for our departure for Quicks Beach on the Murray. While the forecast was for showers, the early news advised that very heavy rain was falling in Ballarat to our west. We were packed quickly and on the road before the rain started. From the caravan park we headed west on the Western Highway (Ballarat Road) before turning north on the Western Ring Road, then north east on the Hume Freeway. By this time the rain was very heavy - but do you think that this would slow down the traffic? Not on your Nellie - the trucks are still sitting on 100 khp with cars trying to pass them - they are all mad!

We stopped for a morning coffee at the Seymour Service Centre which was clogged with trucks re-fuelling. Because of the heavy rain and doubts about access to the Quicks Beach Campground we had a change of plan and decided to head for the Finley Showgrounds. We stopped for fuel at Tocumwal and arrived at Finley Showgrounds at about 1:30pm. The caretaker directed us to a site with power and water and relieved us of $10.00. With showers and toilets it represents good value.

By late afternoon the rain had stopped and the sky was clear.

Set-up with power and water at Finley Showgrounds

Finley Showgrounds

Sunset at Finley - the rain has gone

As Kirrily was back at work today we said our good-byes to her and Ian and headed back to the caravan park. David spent the rest of the day checking our batteries in the caravan as we have had problems with low voltage alarms at Forth. Turns out that the batteries are OK - the specific gravity of all cells in both batteries was better was than 1.275 indicating a full charge. It would seem that our battery protector may be cutting off the power when it reads 10.5 volts, even though the voltage is much higher than that. The solution will be to by-pass the battery protector if it happens again, until a replacement can be obtained. This problem has happened before!

After lunch we went for a drive to Williamstown. The place was packed with vintage cars and Harley Davidson motorbikes in abundance. We walked around the craft market and stopped for an ice-cream. On the way back to the car we stopped to look at the boats for sale at the local Sundance Marine outlet. Di found a nice looking O'May motor-sailer before realizing that it was our boat Moorina. It was good to see it being advertised for sale in Melbourne.

HMAS Castlemaine - a Bathurst Class Corvette built during WW2

Our daughter Kirrily had a 3 day break from work so on Thursday we left the van and spent time with her at her apartment in Windsor. We did a bit of shopping at the Prahran Market then spent a quiet night at home watching a couple of episodes of Outlander on TV.

On Friday we headed for Chadstone so the girls could get a shopping fix before we had lunch at the Sapore Café. That evening Ian joined us after work and we had dinner at the Railway Hotel's Highline Restaurant near the Windsor Station. We had a 7 course degustation menu that featured prawns, rabbit, mushrooms, lamb, veal, topped off with an outstanding milk and honey dessert. A few bottles of wine helped as well. With hind sight probably a course or two too many!

On Saturday it was back to the Prahran Market for the makings of dinner at home, dips and biscuits, fillet steaks, salad and a cheese platter, and a quick visit to Dan Murphys for some champers for the girls, specialty beers for the boys and some red wine. Ian cooked a great fillet steak on the BarBQ. We watched a disappointing game Geelong lost to Sydney - Kirrily and Ian were quite happy though. Once again too much food and too much red wine!

No photos.

We were woken at 5:45 am after a good nights sleep, and told the we would be disembarking at about 6:30 am. When we got to the vehicle deck we were told that the loading crew in Devonport were dills and we would have to drive backwards onto the loading ramp so that we could drive down the other side of the boat to get to the unloading ramp.

When we drove off the ferry we were in darkness with pouring rain, making the process of navigating our way to Ashley Gardens Caravan Park a little more difficult than usual. However with past experience, the Tom-Tom and the Hema Navigator we arrived at the caravan park at about 7:30 am. Thankfully the office was open early and we were soon set-up on drive-through site 52.

We spent the rest of the day catching up on some washing and ironing. The park has a number of Tasmanian caravans and 5th wheelers who are heading north like us, including a Nissan Navara towing a Macquarie 29 5th wheeler with personalised number plates.

How's this for personalised number plates - OUR 05 and TOW 29

Forth is a free camp without power or water - so it was out with the generator. The generator ran for several hours on Monday night then all day Tuesday on a tank of fuel - probably about 15 hours.

At about 4:30 pm we packed up and headed into Devonport to catch the ferry. Pretty much a case of hurry up and wait, as we were not loaded until near last at about 7:00 pm. We were eventually loaded on Deck 5 and told to drive under the ramp for deck 6 - pretty silly really as the van was too high.

We were told to drive under Deck 6, which is lifted up to allow cars to drive under.

We were near last to be loaded onto deck 5

Our cabin was 7000 which is located on deck 7 in the middle at the very front of the ship. The Captain advised everyone to expect 3 to 4 metre seas on a 4 to 6 metre swell. It seems that the stabilizers can cope with that sort of sea as there was not much motion, but being at the front of the ship it was quite noisy when the larger waves hit the vessel. After a couple of red wines we had a good nights sleep.