Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Quite a change of pace this week! After living the high but freezing life in London for 4 weeks I'm now back down under in Sydney on the boat. I left last Sunday morning from Heathrow, where they have the world's rudest ground staff and arrived finally on Monday night. One of my 400 planemates must have breathed on me as I came down with a cold and cough almost immediately. Fortunately the weather was balmy, quite a change from snowy London.
I spent the next few days cleaning Callisto up and getting her ready for her trip North and 2012 cruising season.
My batteries were not charging well and I decided to replace them on Friday and this was bigger job than anticipated considering I was alone. The 13 batteries were delivered to the Marina but yanking the old ones and fitting the new ones was heavy work. They were also slightly smaller than the originals and terminals were on the opposite side, so some modifications were in order to get then to fit tightly in their battery compartment and not allow them to move about. One of the local shipwrights kindly lent me his pick-up truck and told me where I could buy some stainless, Metric fasteners and a new piece of heavy copper bar to cut and drill to tie the new batteries together.
Needless to say, this took twice as long as anticipated and I was late for my Friday night dinner appointment with our friends Carole and Neville on Darling Point. Friday night is crazy busy in downtown Sydney and the trains were very crowded. I got lost in a station in the Sydney CBD called Town Hall which is on about 7 levels, none of which seemed to be connected to one another in any kind of logical way.
I finally emerged from the labyrinth, 45 minutes late and a bit frazzled.
Despite my tardiness, Carole and Neville were the most gracious of hosts and I very much enjoyed an evening of Carole's home cooking and Neville's excellent red wine and their company after a very long and difficult day.
Yesterday was spend on some provisioning, final cleaning and digging all the barnacles off the dinghy and stowing it.
Roger arrived last evening. We had some dinner in the local pub and an early night for me.
It's almost 0600H and just starting to get light. I need to check the weather one last time and then it's on to Manly or Broken Bay tonight and once the predicted southerly winds come in, we sail north 550 NM to Brisbane, Queensland.
I'm looking forward to going back to sea again after 3 months, photos to follow