Day 148, Year 5: Back to the Compressor Problem
Date: Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Weather: Beautiful, Sunny, HOT Day; Rain Dribbles
Location: Gan Island, Addu Atoll, Maldives

I need to write a song about the compressor blues. We knew when we left India that we were going to have a refrigeration man here in Addu Atoll take a look at our problem. Today was the day and it was painful to reopen the whole issue. Riyadh and Ali came mid-afternoon and after doing some testing, Riyadh believes both the old and the new compressor are working just fine. They took them back to their shop to put better connectors on both and will return late tomorrow to see if they can get the system running. It is helpful that both these men speak better English than anyone we dealt with in India. When Riyadh pulled out his I-phone to make a call all I could think is that he is making good money. If he can get the system running, we won’t mind paying the price, so we will just have to see what tomorrow brings. By the way, Ali told us that they buy things like I-phones from EBay and pay much less than they would in the shops here. When they order things, the delivery time is one week. Not bad.

Our day started with a re-anchoring routine that went on and on. I woke up at 5 am and took a look around outside. We were WAY too close to Single Malt but I wasn’t sure why. I said something to Mark and he said he thought we were fine. I tried to go back to sleep, but just couldn’t so by 6 am I was up for the day. We had a little rain shower, but certainly not enough rain to clean the grime from our canvas. It just left little runs of black grime from India. When Mark got up, he did decide that we needed to try and re-anchor. The anchorage here is tight and we are between Single Malt and Constance with two tourist boats on one side of us. So we tried another position, and then another, and then another. Finally on the fourth try we think we got it right, so hopefully we won’t have any more close encounters with Single Malt.

The rest of the day was spent trying to get a good connection to the internet. We went to the Youth Cyber Café that is right next to where we take our dinghy when we go ashore. It is air-conditioned and comfortable with three computers and one station for connecting your own laptop, a couple of overstuffed and very comfortable sofas and a TV with CNN, ESPN, and who know what else. Nice little place-but slooooow internet. Mark was trying to upload photos to our website and it took about thirty minutes for just one picture. In the meantime, Ed of Constance had gone to try and return one of the capacitors he bought yesterday and bought a top up card for our modem. When he returned, Mark tried that and the connection was a bit faster, but still frustrating. And VERY expensive. So when we went back to the boat, we tried yet a different system. There is wifi in the anchorage but when we looked at the low signal last night, we didn’t think it would work. Our agent, Mas-ood had printed out instructions on how to get a user name and password for us, so all you do is turn on the computer and log in. Even with the low signal, it works much faster than the modem or the hard-wired computers at the Cyber Café. You pay for it by keeping your cell phone topped up, so it is easy and it is affordable. But the low signal is not looking good for Skype video. And, in fact, Mark has not been able to log into Skype at all so far. We will have to continue this quest tomorrow.

My goal for tomorrow is to try and find out just where we can go snorkeling here to see some of the beautiful soft corals that this area is famous for. We have also asked our agent to have fuel delivered tomorrow. He hasn’t called us back to let us know if that can happen, but if not tomorrow, then the next day. I think Mark has been successful in uploading the underwater photos from Uligan, so if you want to see those go back to Days 140 and 141. Most of the photos from India have also been uploaded.