freebsd5.3 and 9.3.0 with notify

[J.D. Bronson]

I am having an odd issue. I compiled from tar src the 9.3.0
on a FreeBSD 5.3 machine. It built fine :)

However, I noticed the following and cannot for the life of me figure this 
out...

When the machine boots (master DNS) it is told to go out and notify my 
slaves. This does not seem to work and I dont know why.

the named log shows 'sending notifies' and then I see this:
zone wixb.co.uk/IN/external: sending notifies (serial 2004112100)
zone wixb.com/IN/external: notify to x.x.x.x#53: retries exceeded


however, if I pkill named and manually start it up - notifies work
just perfect. So I am sure its not my config file(s).

I am wondering if named is starting too early in the boot process or if it 
needs something else in order to run correctly.

Anyone have any thoughts on what is not happy here?

My /etc/rc.d/named file is default
and has this at the beginning:

# PROVIDE: named
# REQUIRE: SERVERS
# BEFORE:  DAEMON


any thoughts on this?

  -JDB