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We arrived back in Cairns on the evening of Thursday, Aug 1.  The next day Ron is flying to Brisbane for a week. Bradley and I spend the next nine days in Cairns. There are lots of fun things to do in Cairns. Unfortunately we don't get to do any of them. We spend almost all our time:

We did manage to have one bit of fun. We've been on the lookout for art for our house and also for one space in the boat. There are two galleries in town that have beautiful photographs (called Ilfoforms) taken by very famous Australian photographers. We liked them both but after more careful inspection, seem to favor Peter Lik. So we looked at everything displayed in his gallery as well as his entire catalog. We selected several pieces we liked and after looking at them, narrowed it down to one piece for the house and one for the boat. The piece for the house we will have framed at home. The boat piece we need to have framed here. We did not like the frame selection offered by the gallery so we decided to look for a frame shop.

Later, as we were on our way to the shop of the guy working on our computer monitor, we passed a frame shop. We stopped in to see what he could do. We noticed a beautiful aboriginal art piece in his shop that we really liked. We had  been looking for some high quality aboriginal art for the house. The piece in his shop had been bought and was being re-framed for the new owner. But we did get the name of the gallery where we could see more work by that artist, whose name was Blitner.  There also happened to be a woman artist in the shop getting two of her pieces framed for an exhibition. She is also an Aboriginal artist and her pieces were figures baked on a clay piece and then painted. We both really liked one of her pieces and struck up a conversation with her. Her name is Januerie and she said the piece would be for sale after the exhibition. So we agreed to buy it!

Later we went to the gallery the frame guy had recommended and found a piece we liked by Blitner, who is a well regarded artist from Arnumland (in the Northern Territory). It was even better than his piece we had seen in the frame shop because it was a little smaller and would fit better in our house. A very productive week as far as buying art is concerned!

We also did manage to fit in a movie on our last day in town. We saw The Windtalkers about the Navajo Code talkers in WWII. When we got to the theater, they had a regular rate as well as discount rates for Students, seniors, and unemployed. Bradley jokingly asked if we could get the unemployed rate. The cashier asked if we had unemployed cards and Bradley replied that we did not have Australian cards, that we reside in the US but are unemployed. Sure enough, we got the lower rate!

Finally it was time to head back out. On August 12 we departed for a week of crusing around the outer reefs. Unfortunately, on the way to our first stop at Opal Reef, the auto pilot failed again. THis time the motor seemed to have completely burned up. We continued on to Opal and spent two lovely days diving and catching tasty dinners. Ron also installed our backup auto pilot system which we wanted to test anyway. But we needed to get the primary system working so we headed back to Port Douglas, about 35 miles north of Cairns.

We were just coming into the marina at Port Douglas and Bradley was bringing in the fishing line in preparation for docking. The seas were a little rough and somehow the hook ended up pretty deep in his finger. The hooks have barbs on them to prevent them from coming out, so all we could do at the time was to cut the hook off the lure with wire cutters. An hour later we had docked and went to the local medical clinic where Bradley got a nice finger numbing shot. Then the doc pushed the hook through and pulled it out the side. I got to watch in case we ever have to do this on our own (I hope not!). Bradley also got a tetanus shot since the hook was nice an rusty, and some nice antibiotics. He's fine now and we got a new hook to replace the rusty one we had to cut off.

After more repairs on the auto pilot system, Ron's friend Dave drove up from Cairns to go out for a days sailing to test the pilot once again. Saturday evening we took a ride up the local river. We found some coconut trees on a golf course and wanted to get a coconut. There was only one on the ground and it was no good, but Dave valiantly tried to throw it up into the trees to knock down another one. Very entertaining, but not successful. We also went underneath a railroad bridge that was so low we all had to lie flat in order to get under it. We're pretty sure not many boats get past that point! Inspired by our success (and maybe by the drinks we had had) when we got back to the marina, we decided to dinghy underneath one of the large dive boat catamarans. It had a lot more clearance that the railroad bridge!

Sunday we sailed for about six hours and the auto pilot seems to be working fine. We stopped briefly at Tongue Reef where Ron and Dave caught two nice coral trout and we saw two whales swimming nearby and doing a nice show including a couple jumps completely out of the water. We anchored for the night at Low Isles and headed back to Port Douglas early so Dave could get to work. Got up at 5:00am to watch live coverage of the final round of the PGA Championship.