The Earl of Spencer - Thursday

Who the....?
Actually not who, but where would be an appropriate question. Albany is full of royalty references - King George Sound, Princess Royal Harbour, Earl Street, Duke Street etc... And at the corner of Earl and Spencer Streets, high on the hill with views across the bay is an old world English style pub called the Earl of Spencer. Our friends (since we were all teenagers) Sandi and Hud came across from Denmark to have lunch with us and recommended this friendly pub for a traditional pub lunch. We ate like Queens and Earls and then backed up the right royal feasting with coffee and cake at Limeburners Distillery which was on our way back to the Yacht Club. Our cake sampling plates seemed to be a spread of very cake left in the cabinet so a request was made for a "doggie bag"- the rest of the crew would definitely enjoy the balance we thought.  The grinning waitress cheerily filled 2 little containers, added a couple of squirts of cream for good measure and drew a smile face on each lid. Wow, we left grinning like kids with a trophy smuggled beneath our coats. By now the Princess Royal Harbour, the sky and the gap in between were an indistinguishable grey. Albany's 18mm of rain that day, pretty much arrived as we were leaving.

Hud claims that he and the nation depicted on is T-shirt are declining at the same rate!

FYI the distillery is really worth a visit. They make whiskey in particular, but also a couple of varieties of gin and other liqueurs. They had some of their whiskey in custom urn-like bottles with pulled glass masted tall ships inside. Stunning; you'd want to buy it even if it were rocket fuel - which I'm sure it's not!

Roy, Jean, Sandi, Hud and the Bloke

On the way back to the yacht club we dropped in to see Sandi's Mum and her partner Roy. Roy races model yachts, and was very keen to come aboard Zofia. The purpose of the visit was to invite him. It also gave us the opportunity to see Roy's models which were lovingly detailed with an incredible level of finish. All the finesse he used in creating Sandi's grandfather clock were on show in his models. Very impressive.

Roy and one of his model racing yachts

The Bloke and I hope to catch up with Sandi and Hud again on the West Coast of South Australia in March. They will be in the area for other reasons and agreed that from what they had so far seen of it on their 6 week trip around Australia, it was lovely and worthy of a revisit. Hud's explanation in support of only taking 6 weeks to tour the continent by road is that he wasn't actually discovering it! A get-together after our Bight crossing is a great objective.
Our cake trophies were enthusiastically accepted as a dessert offering aboard Urchin in the evening. B1 and Maree have a similar problem with their Waeco freezer as we do with our Engles. The plug to the boat is a tad loose (on the Bloke's attention list). The full-to-capacity freezer aboard Urchin had become merely a fridge overnight after having been inadvertently knocked, so Maree spent the day converting raw meat into cooked meat and we were enlisted to help eat some of it. The balance of the 18mm of rain was delivered while we did so and getting on and off the boats to the jetty was not for the feint hearted and luckily our centre of gravity, by this time, had shifted to below the belt.