Day 44, Year 4: Making Progress . . . Sort Of
Date: Friday, December 5, 2008
Weather: Another Sunny, Hot Day
Location: Rebak Marina on Pulau Rebak Besar, Langkawi, Malaysia

Today was one of those days that was actually productive but didn’t feel that way. Things just moved a little slower. My early morning was spent going to the market at the ferry dock on the main island. I went on the ferry with lots of other woman, almost no men, and when we got to the other side, a young Chinese man arrived in his van filled with Styrofoam coolers. In each cooler there were different kinds of frozen meat, all varieties of vegetables, bananas, papayas, oranges, and on and on.
He has frozen duck, chicken, sausages of many varieties, steaks, cod, salmon, and even smoked salmon. I couldn’t believe the variety and the quality. It was good, but probably more expensive than shopping in Kuah. But I got bib lettuce and romaine, my main goal for going, and filled my basket with New Zealand avocadoes, green and red peppers, brussel spouts, tomatoes, and just all sorts of goodies.

When I returned to Windbird Mark was finishing the job of digging out old plugs in the teak deck and drilling the holes deeper to hold new screws and plugs. He then decided to have Noel Bradley, the man who runs the little chandlery here, replace our top life line. When Kevin and Claire arrive, they will be bringing netting that we will install between the top life line and the toe rail. This is a new installation to keep visiting grandbabies onboard and we didn’t want to attach it to the old
line that was showing signs of rust and decay beneath its white plastic coating. So new life lines were made and installed in the early afternoon. It was about this time that things started to fall apart. We thought we had saved money by buying half-used cans of two-part paint from the chandlery here on Rebak, but when we opened it we discovered that it was not white as the can indicated, but a very nice tan. Not what we wanted for the next job which was painting the shower stall, the dinghy
motor mount to which Mark has sanded and applied new epoxy, and the toilet seats lids that we had removed for painting. So here we are with no paint, which means no toilet seats on the toilets, and a shower stall which I ended up painting with a white outdoor paint we had aboard. I have no confidence, however, that this paint will really adhere to the newly expoxed shower stall. So somehow we are going to have to work in another trip to Kuah to buy paint. Ugh! We had planned to leave here no
later than next Wednesday or Thursday to do a little cruising around the island of Langkawi, but we might have to skip that in order to get work completed. This is another one of those times that we just have to wait and see how things play out.

I’ll end with a bit of a joke on us. Yesterday we spent some time looking through photos on Justin and Jo’s Picasa website. We saw a picture of J & J and a man named Al. I emailed Justin and asked, “Who is Al?” He wrote back saying that he and Jo assumed my question was a joke. Al was Al Gore, and Justin and Jo were sure we would know that. I wrote back telling them that I believe we have been floating around out here too long. I can’t believe neither Mark nor I recognized Al Gore. Admittedly,
he has gained a bit of weight, but he should have been recognizable. I think we have been disconnected from video images just a little too long!