by Judy Handley | Oct 31, 2009 | Malaysia, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 4, Year 5: Back Home on Windbird
Date: Friday, October 30, 2009
Weather: Hot and Sunny with Evening Rain
Location: Rebak Marina, Pulau Rebak, Langkawi, Malaysia
It was a good day, good to be back on Windbird, but she is still a mess inside with things piled everywhere. We worked all day, but we probably really only worked the equivalent of two-three hours. The heat requires that you stop every few minutes for a rest period, so progress is very slow. But one really good thing happened. After putting our boat back in the water after the two months of refit in Thailand last spring, we discovered that we had a faulty through-hull. For those of you who aren’t familiar with what a through-hull is, I’ll do a little explanation. Boats have holes in them that allow salt water to come in for flushing toilets, cooling the engine, draining sinks, etc. But you certainly want to control that flow of salt water or you’ll sink! So you put these special valves in each hole called through-hulls. This allows you to shut off the flow of water when it is not needed. It was our aft sink drain valve that was broken, so when we left the boat last April, Mark dove down and pounded a wooden peg in the hole so we wouldn’t have to worry about a leak while we were gone. We were going to have the boat hauled out of the water next week in order to safely put in the new valve without the threat of salt water flowing in while doing the repair. But this morning Mark got up and easily replaced the valve in a matter of minutes. The only tricky part was when he had to knock out the wooden peg and stem the flow of salt water while shutting off the new valve. He was ecstatic that it worked so smoothly and his half hour of work saved us a few hundred dollars in haul-out fees. I wasn’t quite as successful. I spent my day cleaning the deck of the boat. That’s something that usually takes only an hour or two, but it took me all day in the hot sun and I have a nicely burned back to prove it. We also tried to rent an air-conditioning unit from Noel, the guy who runs the little marina store and boat watches in our absence, but the unit was not working. When our friends on Shirena leave for Australia on Monday, we hope to take over their unit. We don’t mind the heat when we are out on the water, but in the protection of the marina, the air just doesn’t flow and it is stifling. Add to that the daily rains that require you to shut up the boat, and an air conditioner sounds mighty good.
Tim of Rendezvous Cay came over in the morning to welcome us back and invite us over for Happy Hour prior to the Bloody Halloween Eve dinner being put on by the marina and adjoining resort. It was great to catch up with Tim and Rose and Dave and Judy of Freebird on Rendezvous Cay and then we went to enjoy the great dinner and entertainment put on by marina and resort personnel. The couple with the best costume won a free night at the resort and that was Richard and Susan of Sea Bunny. Richard went as an exorcist and Susan as a designer bat. The hotel staffers were dressed as ghouls and put on a Michael Jackson style dance performance. It was great fun.
by Judy Handley | Oct 30, 2009 | Malaysia, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 3, Year 5: Penang to Langkawi
Date: Thursday, October 29, 2009
Weather: Malaysia Hot and Sunny
Location: Rebak Marina, Pulau Rebak, Malaysia
We made it home and everything is fine aboard Windbird, but it is HOT. There are touches of mildew here and there, but overall the boat looks great. It’s simply too hot to work at a normal pace, however, so we barely got our suitcases unpacked and the cover on the boat removed before it was time to go to dinner. Tomorrow we will clean the deck and then begin the process of taking sails and other items that belong on deck out of the boat so we can move.
We left Penang at 8:00 am on the Langkawi Ferry. I had a great conversation with a woman from Alaska who works for a cruise company and Mark talked to a family from Cochin, Inida. Before we knew it, we were at the dock in Langkawi. The skies were blue, the sun was shining, and everything looked more beautiful than we remembered. Langkawi is a very clean island and right now everything is so green. The rainy season is coming to an end so this is the perfect time to arriver here. We got a taxi to take us across the island to the Rebak ferry and by 1:00 in the afternoon we arrived in Rebak Marina. Tina and Robert on Shirena met us on the dock when we arrived. They helped us carry our bags to Windbird and invited us to dinner. Even though we did manage to get the refrigerator running, we don’t have any food. So the dinner invitation was a wonderful gift. Robert and Tina head home to Australia on Monday, so it was great to get the chance to catch up on what’s been happening in the cruising world.
by Judy Handley | Oct 29, 2009 | Malaysia, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 2, Year 5:Â LAX to Hong Kong to Penang, Malaysia
Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Weather: Southeast Asia Warm and Rainy
Location: Hotel Malaysia, Penang
We started our Tuesday with a midnight toast in an airport bar in Los Angeles International Airport. It certainly wasn’t a romantic setting, but it was the best we could come up with in the airport terminal. We were sitting on bar stools overlooking renovations to the food court area, both of us with our computers going. I think you get the picture. We then boarded our Cathay Pacific plane at 1:00 am LA time, 4:00 am East Coast time. At that point we had already been up for over twenty hours. We were served dinner just after take off and then tried to sleep. The Cathay seats are much more comfortable than most US airlines, but still we only slept for five hours. We still had eight hours to go, so we filled the time watching movie after movie. We arrived in Hong Kong at 7:00 am and spent the next eight hours working on our computers, reading, eating, and walking. We left Hong Kong at 3:00 pm and at 6:40 pm we arrived in Penang, took a taxi for the 18 kilometer ride into Georgetown, and checked into the Malaysia Hotel. We are exhausted, so we are going to forgo the sushi dinner we had planned. We have to be at the ferry terminal by 7:30 am to catch the ferry to Langkawi, so sleep seems much more important than eating at this point. And besides, we were served dinner our flight from Hong Kong and aren’t hungry anyway. We are just happy to be here and grateful that we had no problems with any of our flights. And miraculously, all our luggage arrived. We had a return ticket on Cathay Pacific from Los Angeles, but purchased Delta flights from Myrtle Beach to LA separately. But Delta checked all four 50+ pound bags straight through to Penang and they made it and we didn’t have to pay anything, so for that we are grateful. Now we are just anxious to get back to Windbird to see how she fared in our absence.
by Judy Handley | Oct 27, 2009 | Malaysia, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
091026 Year 3 Heading Back to Malaysia
Date: Monday, October 26, 2009
Weather: Fair and 88 degrees F
Location: Los Angles International Airport, USA
Well, here we are in LAX waiting for our 1:00 am flight to Hong Kong. After an eight hour wait in Hong Kong, we travel on to Penang in Malaysia. We take a ferry from Penang out to the island of Langkawi, a taxi across the island, and then another ferry out to Pulau Rebak where our beloved Windbird waits for us. We lose a day when we cross the International Dateline so it will be Thursday evening before we reach Rebak Marina. In the meantime, we will celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary with a midnight toast in LA, lunch in Hong Kong, and dinner in Penang. Now just how many people do you know who have spent an anniversary in three countries?
Friends have been emailing us telling us that Windbird looks great, but we have never been away from her for this long and are naturally anxious to get back to see for ourselves. But I must admit that this sailor is having a very hard time leaving family after our wonderful six-plus month visit. When we started our world voyage four years ago our children were in their late twenties, independent, and had no children of their own. That scene has changed. Now that we have three beautiful grandbabies, traveling half-way around the world to continue our cruising life is more difficult. We will miss them terribly, but at the same time, we know Windbird is chomping at the bit to make her way home. If all goes well, we’ll be back in US waters in a year and half where traveling to visit family will be much easier and more affordable. Until then, we will depend on email and Skype to keep us connected. I don’t think I could have attempted a circumnavigation fifteen years ago when email was limited and Skype was nonexistent. Even three years ago, finding places with high speed internet capable of sustaining two-way video calls was not easy. I’ll never forget how sad our friends Monika and Felix from Germany were when they returned from a visit home after our Pacific crossing. They were so excited to fly home from New Zealand to see their three-year old twin grandchildren. But when they arrived at the airport in Germany, the twins didn’t recognize them. Monika was heartbroken and made the decision that when she and Felix returned to New Zealand, they made a beeline for the Mediterranean. Cruising the world in your own sailboat is a dream of a lifetime, but without good communication with family, the dream becomes clouded. We feel so lucky to be sailing in a time when the world has truly become smaller through the wonders of modern technology.
Yesterday we connected with Skype video to both of our children and got to see our grandbabies in action. We then spent a quiet evening with my sister Patsy and her husband Joe and my brother Dickie and his wife Conda. They are spending their retirement years in the Carolinas and enjoying the warmer-than-up-north weather there. And while we were there visiting, they made sure we had a wonderful three weeks. They even ordered some summer weather for parts of our visit. My sister’s daughters Janet drove down from Columbus, Ohio and her sister Jennifer and my brother’s son Tommy came to visit during the first week of our stay. Janet was feeling benevolent and let us use her condo on the beach to warm ourselves after the chilly fall weather we had been experiencing on the Cape. The temp was actually in the high 80’s during that weekend and we enjoyed every minute of it. For our second week, Mark’s brother Steve and sisters Mary Ellen and Jeanie, plus Mary Ellen’s husband Lee, drove up from Florida for a visit. We spent two days looking at about a thousand slides from their childhood years and had a great time reminiscing. My nephew Rex from West Virginia and our good friends Kevin and Claire from Virginia drove down for the next weekend and then last week we drove to Charlotte, North Carolina to visit with my niece Jennifer and her family and my nephew Tommy and his family. While there, we drove north to Boone, North Carolina to visit Tommy’s son Josh at Appalachian State. What a beautiful campus set in the mountains. The weather also cooperated. It was a gloriously warm and sunny fall day and the mountains were aglow with fall color. Perfect. We spent most of the last couple of days furiously shopping for Christmas presents to send to our kids and grandkids before leaving. Christmas shopping in October was just a little weird, but the presents were bought, wrapped, and mailed out this morning on the way to airport. I didn’t get to write, “Do Not Open Until Christmas” on the box, but that is a given. So, no peeking.
Now it’s time to slow down. The very long list of things we thought we would get accomplished while home is still a very long list. We spent our time playing with grandchildren instead of thinking about sailing, but as we chase the sun westward, we are slowly refocusing our attention. It’s time to get ready for our passage across the Indian Ocean. So on goes the voyage of Windbird.
