As much as it was painful to part with the ca$h, Cookie and his off-sider arrived and made the replacement with great efficiency and sort-of painless. Do we feel safer? Perhaps. Lighter? Definitely. The wallet is getting thinner by the day.
With another job ticked off we headed to Brisvegas for an overnighter with the kids and for The Bloke to have a medical scan. One of The Boatworks staff kindly dropped us off at the Coomera train station. By this time we'd pre-purchased our Queensland 'GO' travel cards and travelled for a fraction of the price of our journey the month before. Doh! Slow to catch on. Although there are dollar$ locked into this investment, future visits to Lucas and Amy will see the balance depleted soon enough. How convenient. We now have travel cards for Perth, Sydney AND Brisbane. We are embracing this public transport thing. Our return back to Coomera involved a bus connection from the station and being dropped off just 50m from the entrance to The Boatworks. All of this is duly noted for our next visit here.
By this time, 2 of our 3 day booking of our Marina berth had been used up and our rhythm completely messed up. It was hard to pick up where we'd left off. We had a whole lot of stuff still to do and woke up on the 3rd morning feeling overwhelmed and considering begging an extra day. The 'should we'/'shouldn't we' argument was resolved in the emphatic affirmative by a freaky discovery.
We'd noticed that our battery charger had been running all night. It's located near the battery bank which is under our bunk, so the humming that went on all night was inescapable. The Bloke is pretty sensitive to this stuff and immediately checked the instrument panel in the morning. 14.1 amps input. Hmmm? The regulator will generally hold the batteries at that level of charge for about an hour during the charging process before dropping back and completing the cycle within about 6 hours. End of humming. With a big list to work through, we added this mystery to the bottom and launched into our chores. Time was 'a-wastin' and if we didn't dither, we'd have a better idea by the time the office opened, if we'd be through our tasks sufficiently to be able to leave. We just needed to get cracking immediately.
In the process of stowing items in seldom used lockers in our cabin, I noticed a smell. There had been some bush fires in earlier days, so I put my head up through the hatch to check for smoke. No smoke today so I went below again to investigate a little further. With the regulator issue still front of mind, I decided to lift our mattress and immediately discovered the source of the smell. Plus heat. Plus steam and condensation! Yikes, it was our motor starter battery. It was cooking and venting gas!
The Bloke, as quickly and carefully as he could, detached the cables from the hot battery. Under no circumstances could the negative and positive terminal touch and cause a spark. We had poisonous and volatile gas in the boat. 'Get this thing out of here' was all we could think! One flash and we'd be ash!
Once on the jetty, we got the battery into a trolly to remove this little incendiary package from the jetty and the vicinity of other boats. Once ashore we marched directly into the office to (1) beg another night; (2) determine where to take the dead and dangerous battery; and (3) get advice on where to locate a replacement. Luckily we could have the berth for 1 more night and one of the many suppliers within The Boatworks complex were able to provide a replacement battery and take the old one. TICK-
And so, dear friends, The Bloke's wallet got thinner yet again to the tune of another night on a jetty plus a new battery. In the scheme of things, we had just dodged a bullet. What if the battery had cooked while we were away? Kaboom!!! What if we had been overcome by the noxious gasses? "Hello St Peter". What if the battery had failed while we were offshore? Instead, the timing was as good as having a coronary in hospital and this episode has a happy ending.
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