Bunnings Sausage Sizzle Saga

After a long, but good flight on Air Canada from Vancouver to Brisbane I landed back in Australia. I rode the tilt train for another 4 hours and got to Bundaberg where Georgia has been sleeping for the last few months. I got a room in the Lighthouse Motel. This is one of those places that is clean enough, but they don’t take any online reservations that I can find and certainly don’t push for any high star count.

While staying in the motel I got to enjoy the best of Australian TV. The news was all atwitter over the Bunnings Sausage Sizzle controversy. Bunnings is the local hardware store chain, much like a Home Depot or a Lowes. They like to regularly sell have a sausage sizzle on temporary tables setup out front of the doors. Its usually a charity doing the actual selling. In North American that means they are selling hotdogs on a slice of Wonderbread. For safety reasons they have decided to move the cooked onions to underneath the hotdog instead of on top. This reduces the chance of a rouge onion slice falling on the floor and causing someone to slip and fall. Very controversial, even the Prime Minister has piped in when he was in Singapore for a world leader meeting: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/pm-weighs-in-on-bunnings-sausage-sizzle-debate

While back in the US for so long the constant news cycle of the next less than honorable thing that Trump did was getting really old. There's just so many times you can listen to yet another bold face lie and bother to keep listening. We need a hotdog saga to ease the pain.
After a few days got Georgia back in the water. It takes a long time to strip a boat for a long storage. Unfortunately it takes even longer to put her back together. Most things seem to be still working. The Yanmar engine fired right up. Pumps are working. Failures include the gas-struts in the boom vang and the remote radio microphone. Next up is to get the sails back on, get Chris back here from Nepal and start to head south. Plan is to do a quick haulout with a bottom paint and miscellaneous in the Boat Works yard up the Coomera River south of Brisbane. Should take 3-5 days to get there, weather depending.

 (politico.com)

Jumping Through Visa Hoops

Yea, I know it's been a long time since any new blog posts - lots of family stuff going on, not much sailing stuff. We’re getting ready to get back down to Australia and get Georgia back in the water. She's been sitting in the Bundaberg, Australia sun being carefully watched by kangaroos for too long. We’ve had a great time being exceptional grandparents to our above average granddaughter. We can both speak toddler like a charm, are very experienced with some great kids shows, Curious George being my clear favorite.

Happy and above average grandkid with just as happy granparental units

Australia is really anal about requiring visas for travel. They have a number of tourist visas, each one with increasing stay times and increasing hoops to jump through. The first issue we ran into was when I realized I only had 6 months left on my US passport, not enough to apply for a one year visa. Because I lost my passport ID card a few years ago when my wallet went overboard in New Zealand I could not apply online. I made an appointment at the Bellingham post office and got some great service.
After a couple of weeks I had my new passport in hand. Now to start the online forms for an Aussie visa. A 30 day visa is a couple of forms to fill out and free. A multiple entry visa good for 12 months with a maximum stay of 90-days at a time requires a few more forms and about $25. Having to leave the country every 90-days to re-up the visa was not going to work for us. That brings us to the 12 month, multiple entry up to 12 months at a time stay visa. This visa requires a bunch more forms, including listing every country you’ve been in for the last 5 years with dates. A not short list for Chris and I.
After filing for this visa online we fairly quickly got a response that we are required to have an Aussie approved medical, including chest xray and UAs (urinary analysis). There are a limited number of approved sites in the US you can use for a medical. There’s one in Seattle, but that's a long drive for us. We decided to make an appointment with a clinic in Vancouver, BC. I expected this to be a quick pay your bill and the doc would make sure you can still fog a mirror held under your nose type exam. Wrong. They take this stuff seriously. You have to explain all meds you are using. Get poked and prodded. Chest x ray, UA and plus a blood donation for me.
The purpose of the chest x-ray is to protect the delicate Australians from tuberculosis. Certainly a noble cause, but just doesn’t seem very practical since we have already spent 3 months in the country. After about 3 or 4 days we were both told we had to get another UA. Apparently the quality of our piss has been compromised by drinking too many bottles of Black Butte Porter. So we set up with a lab in Bellingham  to collect our piss and look closely into it so we could send the results to the Vancouver clinic. About a week after the second UA Chris got her visa. My med results were referred to something called Buppa, the medical review company the Aussies use to check the hardcore cases. After another week of being Buppa’d I received my visa.
Around $750 and 3 weeks latter we had electronic visas in-hand. Now was time to figure out flights back to Australia. Chris has to do a few weeks work in Kathmandu before heading back. I was gonna head back to Bundy the first week of Nov but there is a too large sailbaot cruiser rally from New Caledonia heading to the marina and they don’t have any slip space for me to put the boat while I get her back together for cruising. So I’ll head out of here Nov 11 and we can launch Georgia Nov 15. At least that todays plans.

Paul