The cusp

Jan and The General made their "shopping trolly" car available for the Ironman event as well as for getting that pesky molar sorted. Additionally, The General's dentist was charmed into agreeing to an emergency appointment. Calls were made, details exchanged, the time set. Full of apprehension and convinced that I had a crater in my mouth that could house the space shuttle and swallow up a super fund, more land miles were clocked to sort out some kind of care plan.
The dentist was lovely and made a repair to the tooth cusp that should last me until the Bloke and I take a couple of weeks out of our wet and wild tour of Australia and can have a consultation with the regular fang farrier. He even tried to relax me by discussing a biography he'd recently read about Matthew Flinders and the Beagle. Hope we get round a bit faster than that though. Of  course the use of the term 'discussion' is not in the least bit accurate. "Ugh, ugh" is hardly is hardly a conversation starter but it was the best I could manage in view of the instruments, cotton wool rolls etc...The Bloke is of the view that I can talk under wet cement but there are limits and this was one of them.
I'm hopeful that this cusp work is a 'robusta' as Jim's Italian Job, we have spent the last 2 days getting on with business.
The Bloke is always thinking and worrying. He came to the view that the battery for the anchor winch and bow thrusters needed replacing. For the benefit of you land lubbers, they are not sex toys but important equipment! Could the man at the Dunsborough battery shop have been more surprised than to see us for the second time in a year? We had already replaced all our house batteries (5) in January when on 'holidays' and the Bloke had another bout of thinking. In any event, this battery was the only one we had not replaced and was causing an alarm to go off when we were raising greater lengths of chain. What a domino effect! Install more chain (and use it) so you can retire the nagging thought of dragging an anchor and then cause stress in a battery and subsequently the bank account.
In reality, the real reason that the battery was in questionable condition had more to do with the wrong charge cycle having been selected on the charger when the boat was commissioned. It's just another in a long list of things done, or failed to be done, by a category of anonymous people that the Bloke and I affectionately refer to as the "axe murderers".
What might have been a simple task was made more complicated by this battery being the least accessible and requiring the for'd cabin to be almost dismantled. That man Murphy and his Law got on the boat with us. We didn't inspect the battery before we'd purchased a replacement which proved stupid because our assumption that it would be the same as our others was far from true. The windlass battery is housed in a little plastic casing like a lunch hamper and secured to the cabin sole beneath the bunk so the dimensions are quite defined. Like a pair of loonies, we ferried the batteries back and forth lugging them across the sand, into and out of the dinghy and working up quite a thirst. Thank heavens for Jan and The General's 'shopping trolly'. Luckily for us a refund was available for battery #1 and an exact replacement located for the second attempt.
Will we be able to lower and raise the anchor without the engine running? We've never been able to so far but the Bloke is convinced from his reading of the Boat Manual that it should be possible even if the recommendation is to have the engine running as a precaution. And that is how all this battery malarkey started in the first place. The answer will soon be apparent though, we are on the cusp of departing 'Quinny'. The Bloke thinks that the planets are aligning and the weather forecasters are pointing to a departure opportunity in coming days.

Beer o'clock