We are currently on the hard standing at Lawries Marina in Mooloolaba.  We are in serious maintenance mode readying for this year's sailing.  We sailed slowly to Cairns after Hobart and then belted our way back to Bris in Nov into hard SE's.  Gotta say, we really picked a bad year to start serious sailing when considering the G A Bight easterlies, five nasty east coast lows (bombs) last winter when travelling north thru NSW / SE Qld and now weeks and weeks and weeks of winds, rain (never seen anything like it) and constant cloud cover.  It's pretty bloody awful, particularly now that we're trying to do some hull spraying... transom, hull stripes and waterline adjustment.  Every single day it rains.  It is quite amazing and a real piss off, not to mention the associated humidity.  When I lived (and surfed) here for a while in the early seventies it wasn't like this.