Day 18, Year 5: Productive Work Day
Date: Friday, November 13, 2009
Weather: Hot, Sunny Day with Late Evening Rains . . . Again
Location: Rebak Marina, Pulau Rebak, Langkawi, Malaysia

While writing the log date, I realized that it is Friday the 13th. Thankfully we made it through the day with no bad luck and hope you did the same. We started our day by meeting the couple on the boat in the berth closest to us. We actually have no one on either side of us and to our starboard there are a couple of boats with no people onboard at this time. Frank’s boat is to our port and he has just returned from a foray to South Africa. There are many boats here that do the Indian Ocean circuit each year and then return here as a home base.

We then spent our day checking jobs off the TO DO list. I finally got the spice drawer cleaned out. In this extreme heat, spices seem to last only a year. They then solidify and mold. Yuck! So I carefully cleaned out each spice jar so they can be reused. It was painful throwing away the contents, but now that job is done. While I was working on that, Mark was running the new water hose to being water to the forward head from the engine room. This was made necessary by the removal of our forward thru-hull, but now that job is complete. We have a working forward head and one less hole in the boat. In order to do this job, all of the floor boards had to be taken up and that prompted me to cleaning. Every time Mark removed something, I cleaned it. What a great duo!

Next we worked together to take the anchor chain out of the locker, all 300 feet of it, and pay it out on the dock. Then when we brought it back in, Mark applied Lanocote, an Australian sheep lanolin product, to the chain that sits deepest in the anchor locker to try and slow the rusting. The chain really needs to be regalvanized, but for now the lanolin will have to do. Mark also caulked a hole in the compression post that has been leaking right over the table in the main cabin when it rains really hard. After enduring a few too many sprinkles in the main cabin, we remembered that when we removed everything for the paint job in Thailand, that hole in the compression post was caked with caulk. So now that is done once again, and when the rains came this evening, we didn’t get the sprinkles inside. Let’s hope that took are of the problem.

The last job of the day was to start removing the connections on the LPG lines running from the tank outside in a locker to the inside to our stove. We have arranged for travel to town on Monday with Cory and Barbara of Increscent Moon. That will allow us to share the cost of the car and at the same time, get the supplies we need for the reinstallation of the LPG hose. We have only one little canister of butane left for the little campstove we bought in Thailand last year. And people we have checked with say this is not available here. So not a lot of cooking is going to be done here until we can find a gas supply. In honor of that, we went out to dinner at the Hard Dock with Cory and Barbara tonight. Their boat is a sister ship to Windbird, only the second we have met during our voyage. It is so nice to have a sister ship nearby so you can check in when it is time for repairs. When you have the same boat, you probably have had the same problems, and as always, two heads are better than one when thinking through a problem.