Day 10, Year 5: One Little Job at a Time
Date: Thursday, November 5, 2009
Weather: Rain Off and On All Day
Location: Rebak Marina, Pulau Rebak, Langkawi, Malaysia
It was a rainy day with very little sunshine. Just as the sun would begin to shine, the black clouds would come once again from the northeast and shower or deluge us with rain. The good thing was that without the hot sun beating down the air conditioner was allowed to keep the inside of the boat cool. The bad thing was that I did a huge laundry that had to be taken down each time it rained and hung back out between rains. I finally found a way to hang it all in the covered cockpit, but it is still not dry. Now the hope is that it dries before it mildews.
Mark and I both worked on our list of jobs to be done today. After washing three bucket loads of clothes, I made my attack on the inside of the boat by starting in the forward head. My goal is to clean out every cabinet, closet, and drawer in the boat, inventory what is there, and get rid of things we really don’t need. Believe it or not, I only got through one of two cabinets in the forward head plus the four plastic crates that are stored in the forward head. It is slow going, but I will get there one cabinet at a time. Mark’s jobs today included rewiring the GPS, hooking up the new remote control for the autopilot and getting the new wi-fi booster up and working. He finished the first two but he only got halfway done with the wi-fi booster. Internet was not working this afternoon, probably because of the stormy weather, so he will continue tomorrow.
We invited Gerry and Donna of Scot Free II over for dinner tonight. They are leaving in the morning for a couple of weeks or more in Laos. We so wish they were heading on through the Red Sea to the Mediterranean with us this year, but they are determined to spend another year here exploring the countries of Southeast Asia. So we need to seriously start reaching out to find other cruisers headed our way. We know three boats that are travelling our way but they are all catamarans and don’t travel at our speed. We also have Robert and Tina of Shirena, but they are faster than us. I guess they will just have to slow down and we’ll have to push as hard as we can to keep up. But more importantly at this point, we really need to decide exactly where we plan to stop along the way and go back to Penang to get our visas. Mark is lobbying hard for a stop in Cochin, India, so I guess that will be the next big decision. As quickly as possible, the TO DO list of boat chores needs to be accomplished so that we can start focusing on our travel plans. Or maybe we need to institute 50-50 days-half our day working on boat chores and half our day focusing on trip planning. I think I like that idea.
Note: We have been having trouble with the website since our return to Malaysia. Logs are not posting and we are not sure why. So you might read this log as posted, or it could be a few days. You’ll just have to be patient and hope we can work out this situation soon. In the meantime, you are probably going to be reading logs a few days after they were originally sent. Sorry about that. And we are also hopelessly behind in getting our website updated. Hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later. In the meantime, stay tuned for updates in trip planning.
