Wed, 2nd Jan, 2019 10 Mile Outcamp, Tarmoola Station, 60km north of Leonora, WA

7am 31 degrees, no breeze and a clear sky.

Rang Kaylene and Rick for a chat. They are in Townsville for a wedding.

8.30am 35 degrees, warms up quickly. Forecast is for a night temp of 29 tonight which would be nice but it only gets down to that at 5am just before the sun comes up!!

After morning tea we drove out to the highway then across to the Round Oak (Jaguar) Minerals admin office. Spoke to Alan about detecting on their leases and he was fine with that as they aren’t looking for gold. They are underground 800m looking for silver, lead, zinc and copper and he shows us the underground map and said they are going down to 1km soon and they have gone sideways into a new area too. Amazing.

Drove north and checked out some other old mines – some just shallow shafts and another which is a deep pit with water in the bottom – no good for swimming.

The wind is back but it is so hot – better than no wind at all I suppose. The flies are bad too so while we had lunch in the pool I refilled my vegemite fly catcher with fresh vegemite (put it closer to the lid this time) and sat it near us – our entertainment – watching flies get caught!!

Rick had mentioned he saw on U-tube people making air-conditioners out of old eskies and fans. I googled it and Steve got to work creating something with the old bits and pieces here. He first tried a small water cooler bottle with a fan from a computer but it didn’t have enough flow. He then found a broken esky in the dump which he mounted to plastic elbows to direct the air flow and then tried our 12 volt fan. It worked but the fan was too big for the hole so we were losing the air flow. He will check out the old cars at the dump to see if he can pull out a fan motor from one of them. He was happy having something to do even if it is so hot. The breeze blowing through the shed was actually cooler than in the van or the cottage.

As the van was getting so hot Steve decided to put the sprinkler on the roof to cool it down which it did for a while. We sat near it while we had our drinks enjoying a spray of water when the wind blew it over us.

Cooked dinner in the cottage – at least that keeps that heat out of the van. One more day of 40s then it is supposed to drop into the 30s which will be good.