Day 20, Year 5: Just a Day in the Life
Date: Sunday, November 15, 2009
Weather: Hot, Sunny Morning with Rains Beginning Midday . . . Again
Location: Rebak Marina, Pulau Rebak, Langkawi, Malaysia

Today was a typical day in a cruiser’s life. Mark did blue jobs and I worked on pink jobs. Pink jobs today were computer based. I spent the day searching through a year’s worth of emails to try and find all of the emails from friends who transited the Indian Ocean last year and I worked on building the new homepage for our website. Blue jobs included getting the staysail sheets run back to the cockpit with new hardware that had to be attached to the cockpit coaming. That included installing pad eyes on the deck that hold the blocks that the lines pass through. Because we have only two winches on each side of the cockpit and more jobs than the two winches can handle, we needed to find a way to lock off the lines on something other than one of the winches while they are being used for something else, so we installed cam cleats on the side of the coaming. This required taking down parts of the ceiling in the main and aft cabins. We are only half way done, so the inside of the boat is once again in disrepair.

We had dinner on Increscent Moon with Cory and Barbara tonight. They have a Tayana 42 one year younger than ours and it was great fun to compare the differences inside. They will be going to town with us tomorrow and they might be headed Thailand at the same time as us. So we have lots of things in common. But for now we will focus on tomorrow’s trip. The main purpose of the trip is to deal with our stove issue. We have to find out what supplies we can buy in Kuah and then order those that are not locally available. And we need to find either butane gas for our current camp stove or find a new camp stove that will allow us to cook until the main stove repairs are completed. Since some parts are probably going to have to be ordered from the US, we might find ourselves without a stove to cook Thanksgiving dinner. That will be an interesting project. So goes the life of a cruiser . . . more problems to solve, more work to be done, and more shopping for the needed parts, all to be done in exotic locations. So no complaints here.

I have to add one addition to last night’s log. After posting the log, we talked to our daughter Heather and got to see Sam in action. Those six stitches in his forehead are certainly not slowing him down. He did a complete performance for us wearing different hats from his dress-up box. He was a fireman, a policeman, Nemo, a pirate, and Superman. He ended his performance by saying, “Oma, Granddad, come home, stay here.” It was very obvious that he knows how to pull our heartstrings.