Saturday 2nd August Iluka to Lawrence

Left Iluka on the morning tide. No really we did. So with a couple of knots of current to help us up to the Harwood bridge we were early for the 10am opening we’d booked. Things happen at their own pace round these parts and at 10.10am a couple of distant figures in safety jackets and hats wandered casually into view. 10 minutes later the Pacific Highway traffic was stopped, the bridge rose some 25 metres vertically and we proceeded through. The process cuts the main highway between Sydney and Brisbane for about 20 minutes all up. Sorry.
Our goal was Lawrence. This was memory lane stuff for the Admiral who had been locked in the local pub with the police drinking after hours in 1972. After tying up to the public wharf we proceded a few hundred metres to the pub. Unfortunately the original federation pub caught fire in the eighties and has been replaced by a less charming but perfectly adequate red brick joint. Seems to have been an unfortunate number of pub fires hereabouts. The Ebor pub had also self immolated. I suppose beer can be unstable unless handled carefully. Which is certainly what we did with it at Lawrence.
Extricating ourselves from pub and wharf we drifted with the now outgoing tide back towards Maclean stopping en route for a spot of lunch. It was just after leaving Lawrence that strange things began to happen to out instruments. First the mastervolt system indicated that the voltage being put into the batteries was rising at an alarming rate. It got to 18 volts before we shut everything down and turned off both engines. When we rebooted the voltage started coming down to a more palatable 14 volts but then the wind speed indicator showed 60 knots with the direction needle behaving like a demented Ouija board. Having recovered our composure and determined that we hadn’t fried the electrics or boiled the batteries we cast about for explanations. Having ruled out the famed Lawrence Triangle as mere local superstition, we turned our attention to the ABC broadcast tower on the bank and the 11,000 volt cables suspended over the river about 6 metres above the top of our mast. Given that everything has now returned to normal it seems likely that we must have picked up some sort of an electrical charge from the power line. Anyone with any knowledge in this area might like to inform us.
Maclean, a delightful little settlement on the river, boasts two pubs neither of which held our attention for long due to the 5pm Wallabies game. And the less said about that the better.