This morning we had to change all four tyres after parking in a patch of bindis overnight. We pulled one bindi thorn out of a tyre and were rewarded with a loud hissing sound as the air came out at 100psi.
Today we travelled 581 km. This is the furthest Kelly has travelled in one day during this year’s event. Our average speed was 77 kph. In the afternoon the car cruised at 110kph for extended periods. We had a safe day as well, no more incidents.
We had a control stop today at Cadney Park and as usual we took advantage of the sun while we were stationary to add charge to the batteries.
As we had been averaging a higher speed, the team that arrived just before us were kind enough to let us go first from the control point.
As it was, they were about 30 minutes in front of us anyway so it didn’t really make much difference to them and it was safer than passing on the road.
In any case, they overtook us again a bit later on down the road, when we experienced delays due to problems with our radio communications.
Problems with batteries in our portable radios meant that the vehicles in our team miscommunicated about a driver change and lost some time while the changeover was reorganised for a second location, although we did manage to keep the car on the road and rolling during the aborted stop.
We finished up in a gigantic truck park on the side of the road 138 km North of Glendambo in the middle of nowhere with our evening brightly lit by the nearly full moon.
While we waited for our chuck wagon team to make dinner we investigated the latest symptoms in an ongoing problem with our sophisticated electronics.
We were pleased to discover that a loose wiring connection was causing a problem and when we removed the offending circuit board we discovered a number of severely cooked components.
It was a real pleasure to sit in a large circle around a big campfire in the moonlit bush.
After dinner we repaired the damage and swapped the circuit board for a spare one we had with us.
