Chrissy & Xav

 We had planned to dive today but the dive was cancelled due to an insufficient number of other divers booking onto the trip. This was our only chance to head out to Murion Island so we are very disappointed. Since we are still eager to get into the water, we booked in for an afternoon dive at Navy Pier. We dove this site last time we were here and it had an astonishing amount of marine life, although no coral.

Since our dive was not until the afternoon we decided to spend the morning at the beach. Today was a bit cooler than the last few days, but it was still pleasant on the beach and the three of us had a great time. We packed up to leave around ~1pm to leave us enough time to make our dive. Then Frenchy tried to start the car (which was on the beach) and….nothing happened. So he tried again and again and again and it was nothing, nothing nothing. There was no one around to help so Frenchy attempted to switch the batteries (we have a second battery to run the fridge etc), but that didn’t work. Finally he decided to walk back towards Yardie, a few km away.

He was lucky enough to come across a few hippies driving down the road towards Yardie. These hippies were more than happy to drop him at the station. The station office pointed him to another campsite, where they thought there was a man who might be able to help with the car situation. This man refused to come out of his tent and the entire conversation was conducted via his wife, the intermediary, who was translating English to English and back again. Finally the man agreed to come out and try to help.

First we tried to jump start the car, but this didn’t seem to work, especially because the man refused to rev his engine to aid charging our battery. Then he tried to tow us out. His car was smaller and less powerful than ours and with the soft sand he was only able to move us a few meters. Finally, the man tried to use his mechanical winch to pull us out. This didn’t move us even one centimeter.  After all of that he left us to our fate.

Frenchy then decided to go back to the road and flag someone else down, someone with a bigger car and possibly a willingness to rev the engine. He found a nice man willing to help. Before we could do anything a third car arrived. This third car was essentially just like ours, except of course with less stuff in it. The man driving this car also seemed to know a lot about cars – he quickly diagnosed the problem as being a flat battery caused by a malfunction of thingy (a Chrissy technical term in use here) used to isolate the second fridge battery from the main battery. This thingy is supposed to ensure that the second battery can charge the main battery but that the reverse cannot happen. The reverse did happen and as we have not done much driving since arriving in Exmouth our fridge ate all the power out of the main battery. He was able to easily jump start the car and we were saved! But we were saved far too late for our dive trip and so we will leave Exmouth tomorrow for Coral Bay not having done one single dive.

New discoveries: looking under the hood of a car seems like bush porn for the men out here – always an excited crowd when we open the hood

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