Day 13, Year 5: Thirteen Is NOT a Lucky Number
Date: Sunday, November 8, 2009
Weather: Sunny and Hot
Location: Rebak Marina, Pulau Rebak, Langkawi, Malaysia

Today was just one of those days when things didn’t go quite right, so when I started to write this log and saw that is was our thirteenth day into this cruising year, I can put the blame there. I’m sure tomorrow will dawn with a much more positive aura and things will be fine again aboard Windbird. Nothing really bad happened today, it is just that nothing went smoothly. The first big issue is our website. If you are reading this log, the site probably looks considerably different that it did yesterday. We have been having issues with our logs getting posted since we returned and this morning Mark went into he site to try and fix the problem. First mistake. We always have our son do the fixing, but he is at a conference in Florida and we decided to be a little more independent. Second mistake. When Mark made the fix, the site came back saying we needed to do an update, so that is what Mark did. The next thing we knew, all of the logs had disappeared. We had only a white screen. Since we had been having problems, Justin had emailed the current information on how to contact the webhost, so we did that and Mark has been in a back and forth email conversation all day. Basically, we should never have done the update. But since we did, we have lost all formatting on the travel logs part of our site. We’ll muddle through until Thursday when Justin will be available again and hopefully he can get things back to normal. In the meantime, the webhost is restoring the website to their most current backup on November 2. But that restoration is taking a very long time as the website is large–8 gigabytes according to the host. So things might be a bit crazy until Thursday or Friday. Just hang in there with us and we’ll get it all set right.

We had planned to have an early morning video Skype call with Heather, Jed, Sam, and Jonah, but we overslept. By the time we got up at 8:15 am here it was 7:15 pm on the East Coast of the US. That is bath time in the Goldstone household, so we emailed Heather letting her know we would connect on another day. But about that time, we heard the Skype call signal on our computer as she was calling. Things started out great, but then we kept losing sound and finally the video. We called their home phone and talked to Heather, but we didn’t get to watch Sam and Jonah in action for very long. We did get to see Jonah sit up all by himself (he’s only four and a half months old) and we watched as Sam tried to explain that he was on the moon collecting water. So we did have contact but it was disappointing that the internet signal just wasn’t strong enough.

Today was Mark’s organization day. All of the extra spare parts from our refit in Thailand needed to be stored away and there was no room to store anything. So we worked together to consolidate, record what things were going to be stored where, and then get things put away. We have another day of work to do on that, but progress was certainly made.

Everyday boats come in and other boats depart. Today Peter and Catherine on The Southern Cross left for Thailand. We will probably be in the Andaman Islands at the same time as they are, so we plan to see them there and continue on toward the Red Sea at the same time. They are a catamaran, however, and we won’t be traveling at the same speed. During the next week we hope to connect with other cruisers heading our way that travel at about the same speed. There is a boat from New Zealand right across the dock from us, Hanalike, that looks like a possible match. We hope to find time to connect with Mike and Linda and check out their plans. Wild Card, Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander’s boat, arrived here yesterday. I know they are also headed our way and should be compatible in speed, so we need to check with them to see what their plans might be. So the search has begun and we now have Windbird organized enough to start and put our efforts into planning for the months ahead. Right now we are thinking December in Thailand, January in the Andaman Islands and Cochin, India, February in the northern Maldives with arrival in Salala, Oman. And then March from Salala to Aden in Yemen and on through the Red Sea with arrival in the Med in late April or early May. So now I have put it in writing and this will give us the incentive to really start doing our research to see if this is really the schedule.