Day 38, Year 5: Waterline is Getting Lower
Date: Thursday, December 3, 2009
Weather: Beautiful Day but Still Windy
Location: Kuah, Langkawi, Malaysia
As we continue to shop and fill up every nook and cranny on Windbird with food and drink, the waterline just gets lower and lower. Mark went with Tina and Robert this morning to get dinghy fuel and to go to the liquor warehouse. Tina and Robert had a rental car until 11:30, but not all of us would fit so I stayed home and got Christmas ornaments for the grandkids packaged and ready to post. Mark returned with two jerry jugs of diesel fuel, a case of wine, and a bottle of Tanqueray gin and Angostura bitters. This is the last resort. When all the beer and wine is gone, we hear that you can mix gin with water with a couple of drops of bitters and that it makes an acceptable drink. So sometime late next summer when you hear that we are drinking gin, you will know it is definitely time for us to make landfall!
After Mark returned he worked with the wind generator. He installed it while we were at Rebak, but we haven’t had enough wind to test it. Now we have wind and he was very pleased that all systems seem to working beautifully. Today we were getting 4-10 amps of powers from 15 knots of wind. That’s a better power boost from the wind generator than we have ever had previously, so maybe the new Air Breeze is really an improvement over the old Air-X. After lunch we went to shore and walked a half a mile in one direction to the post office to mail some packages and then walked the mile in the other direction to town. We had a list of things we needed to get, so we trekked from store to store-picked up underwater photos we took last year with a disposable camera but neglected to get processed, bought a check valve for our plumbing system, returned the courtesy flags we bought two weeks ago for the Red Sea route and got our new flags for the South Africa route, bought a copy of the East Africa Cruising Guide, went to the computer shop to get more advice on how to get our new wifi booster up and running, bought bread, got new prescription drugs to replace outdated ones we have been carrying in case of emergency, bought bread, and then went to the supermarket and filled up the cart with as much as we could possibly carry. We got a taxi back to the jetty as we were now two miles away and the bags were impossibly heavy.
Once back on Windbird the chore of finding a place to store everything began. I have one storage area where I keep sand toys, an inflatable kiddy pool, and a plastic box of Duplo Legos that we bought when Sam came to visit last year. We won’t be needing those things this year, so I put canned goods in that storage area and will find another place to keep the toys. Once everything was put away, we headed right back out to say hello to Darrell and Loretta on CanKata and then over to Safina for Happy Hour. We had a great time catching up with Jean Pierre and Collette. The last time we saw them was when they came to stay with us at the One 15 Marina in Singapore. They are staying here for one more year and will doing the South Africa route next year, so we shared information on that. We went to shore to have dinner but didn’t stay for the entertainment tonight. The agreement with the mosque next door to the jetty complex is that no entertainment can compete with prayer times. So it is not until after 8:30 prayers that the show can go on. Maybe we’ll have dinner onboard tomorrow night and then go in later for the entertainment. Nine o’clock is not that late, but it is cruiser midnight. We are also considering going to the public day of the air show on Saturday with Jean Pierre and Collette. We may never get out of here!
Tomorrow is Friday so most businesses are closed, but the major supermarkets are open. We will try to finish up our grocery shopping and take time to see what else needs to be done before we leave here. If all is on track, we will decide whether or not to stay for the air show, and then check out and be on our way to Thailand on Sunday. Robert and Tina of Shirena should be heading out about the same time, so we can do a bit of buddy boating on the way up. We can’t wait to get to those beautiful Thai islands once again.
