As our trip to Australia was looming, we used the fine, dry weather to empty the entire contents of the boat onto the decks and trampoline in a massive, multi-day Spring cleaning. Australian Biosecurity may possibly want to see every single piece of wood on the boat. This includes bulkheads and the panels underneath all of our storage spaces. If they find something they don’t like, they may decide to really tear the boat apart.
The big clean!
We were pretty certain that we were not suffering from any sort of infestation, but the only way to be sure they wouldn’t find any insect carcasses was to get to all of the boat’s hidden dark areas first, thus the complete teardown. We didn’t find anything other than some grime to deal with, but it was good to give everything a good scrub. We also got rid of a lot of old and worn-out stuff that we are never going to use, including donating 3 infant life vests we had aboard.
Ashore we walked all around the island, and over the top too
Close up at some of the rocks (and another sea-snake)
We did take a little break from cleaning and rowed ashore for a walking lap around the island. Along the way, we found some interesting formations that we assumed were fossilized mud pools. We later learned that it was more interesting than that. Basse Terre, the big island of New Caledonia, was part of the super-continent of Gondwanaland and is one of the oldest land masses on the planet. The structures were fossilized stromatolites from way back in what paleontologists call the Boring Billion between the first evidence of life on Earth and the explosion in complexity of multi-cellular creatures. Stromatolites are basically formed by a living slime that slowly builds up over millennia to form rounded boulder-like structures. During that time, they slowly released oxygen into the atmosphere until it was at high enough levels for animals like us. Thanks, slime. {Note: living stromatolites can still be seen thriving in a few places on earth - including Shark Bay in Western Australia - which we visited way back in 2009}
We were excited to see a couple of Ospreys up close, and with their lunch
Since we had to clean the hulls - we found some time for a quick snorkel too
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