Day 27, Year 4: Strike That, Move Forward
Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Weather: Rain Early Morning; Mostly Overcast Day; No Wind
Latitude: 02 degrees 45.665 minutes N
Longitude: 101 degrees 21.500 minutes E
Location: Second Day of Passage, Port Dickson to Langkawi, Malaysia
Miles to Go: 109
You just can’t depend on some people to do what they say they are going to do. Yesterday we were headed to Penang, a city on the coast of Malaysia, but today we are headed to Langkawi, a group of islands offshore. I wrote to both of our children this morning and told them that we are as fickle as the wind at this time of the year in Southeast Asia. But actually, I think we have just mellowed into the cruising life where your plans change constantly depending on the weather, the wind, the currents,
and your frame of mind. We would like to see Penang, but once we got going, we decided that we just didn’t want to stop. I checked my bible, the Lonely Planet, and found that we can take a ferry from Langkawi to Penang for very little money and be there in less than two hours. So we changed our plans. We now have one more night in the Strait of Malacca with it’s myriad of fishing boats, tugs, tankers, floating debris, and rain storms, and then we will be in Langkawi where we can relax and get
ready for a week or two of boat maintenance. Langkawi is really a group of about 99 islands on the northern Malaysian border. Only one of the islands is of any size and it is the one referred to when people say they are going to Langkawi. We will arrive in the only town of any size on the island tomorrow mid-day, check-in, and try to meet up with Robyn and Eric on Scorpido before they leave for Thailand the following morning. We got an email from them today and Robyn explained that we will arrive
just in time for the Wednesday Night Market. Don’t know what that is, but we’ll check it out and probably see them there.
When we arrive in Langkawi, we will have moved from the Strait of Malacca to the Andaman Sea. We will have rain, but nothing like we have been experiencing. We are in the transition period between the Southwest and the Northeast Monsoons and the further north we go, the drier it will get. Because we are in that transition period we have been having very fickle winds. Sometime between now and the middle or end of January, the Northeast Monsoon should come into full play and that is when people
head across the Indian Ocean. We are looking forward to no more thunder and lightening shows, much less rain, and slightly cooler weather. It is amazing to me that we are leaving an area where the wet season is just beginning and almost overnight we will be in a new weather zone where the dry season is just beginning. But we will still have the 90 per cent humidity. You can’t have it all.
