Friday 31 May, MD day 6: Move into the marina and start layup jobs list.
Another very peaceful night in this lovely anchorage in Herring Bay, and we wake up refreshed and ready for action.
After Herrington Harbour North Marina confirms the availability of a dock for us, Cloudy Bay lifts the anchor for the last time this season and we motor in. A bit twitchy as we monitor the depths of 2.7-3m along the entrance channel. Here is where we ran aground twice last year whilst going in. It was dredged since. The helpful marina staff assists us with the lines and we are docked in 2.7m of water.
Currently the gentle wind is nicely blowing us away from the dock, but just to be safe Glen inflates the big sausage fenders which, when set horizontally, fend us off the pilings and keep us at a good distance from the dock.

We happily connect to shore-power (maybe we even need to switch on air-con later!) and attack the tasks. Firsts, call Selden. We want to send them our Furlex hydraulic motors for servicing. 11 years and 20.000nm, they are definitely ready for a service. A very helpful Pete (the only servicing person outside of Sweden which is authorized by Selden) instructs Glen on how to safely remove the 3 motors and we have a plan on this task.

We also receive some very useful info from EmpirBus, regarding the issue we recently had with the control panel, which switched off out of the blue and we found ourselves with no hydraulics when we most needed the Furlex. It looks like the problem is not the control board, but a negative connection that is common to all the switches in the pedestal.

Then time to pack the seadoo and the evaporator, which we happily drop at the post office to be delivered to their new owners. Two big items off the boat. The space seadoo clears under our berth will become the storage space for our spare outboard motor (if it will fit!).
And while out in Deale, we pay the daily visit to the hardware store, where we buy a tarp to be used as an over-boom cover when we leave Cloudy Bay in the yard. Purple bird poop drives us nuts – we already have plenty of it on the decks and the bimini, and we’ve only been in the marina for just a few hours! We briefly contemplated on shrink wrap Cloudy Bay for the summer, to protect her from bird poop and dirt. It comes with a price tag of $1,500, and after a bit of thought we decided we can do lots of cleaning for that amount of money.

Also on the cleaning theme, we started the long process of washing the ropes. Soon we realized that in the buckets we don’t make fast progress, so the inflatable paddling pool took a proud place on the foredeck and the sheets get a good clean. We filled it twice with lines, and there are still more to wash. Just where do we normally store all these lines? Oh, yes, lots of spaghetti on the deck and up the mast!
The outboard engine also got a flush with fresh water and is now ready for storage.

For the evening we have a break from our jobs and go out for dinner. Ray invited us to the across the bay Skipper’s Bar (thank you, Ray). We could have easily taken the dinghy there, but the outboard is clean now! We have a delicious dinner and a great time chatting with Ray, all topics boat related, of course 🙂
Back at Cloudy Bay it is too late to be doing any more jobs, and when we see it is actually 11pm we happily go to bed. Now we are in the marina, it will be full on jobs, no doubt till the very last moment that we depart for the airport!