After numerous flushes of the coolant system with a mix of fresh water and radiator flushing detergent, it eventually showed signs of clearing out by late yesterday afternoon, but still required a few more flushes. With daylight fading, that meant another job for another day. However, a faulty non-return valve installed as part of the new fuel polishing system became the next culprit and the possible cause of the spluttering on startup. Unfortunately, we’re, once again, awaiting the delivery of new parts, with a few spares thrown in for good measure, which, we hope, will eventually get our generator working again.
We can’t but wonder, though, if these are all the issues we’re having while residing on Paw Paw and doing our best to tick everything over at scheduled intervals, while not being able to set sail to distant lands of our choosing because of this pandemic and all the associated border closures, we hate to think what issues would have awaited us had we left her unoccupied for months on end! Granted she’s nearly 10 years old, but she’s been well maintained over those years, nonetheless.
Elaine’s walks, however, are a pleasant reminder that we are, in fact , marooned on a tropical island. Under clear blue skies, with a cool breeze blowing, standing under the swaying palm trees, staring out over the Andaman Sea, a spectrum of jade, and watching the fishermen and cargo ships sailing up and down, was indeed the reminder, not to mention the sweat constantly dripping off us! Today’s walk had a few additional pleasures; butterflies, a small monitor lizard, the smallest she’s seen, a variety of birds, other than the horrible crows and the otters frolicking close to the little beach. Of, course, the gardener was also doing his best to provide some relief to the plants deprived of rain water now that the “dry season” is upon us.
Our day ended on Wednesday with a video call from Elaine’s sister in Ireland before heading to bed for an early night and then a video call from Justine last night, both related to Elaine’s special projects, which took up most of her day yesterday, together with a few administrative tasks. The only break we took was for a mid-morning coffee at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, but that turned out to be a complete waste of time; besides not having decaf coffee, they didn’t have any non-dairy milk either, so it was a caffeinated long black for Roy and a green tea for Elaine. Not sure why we bothered really, when we could have had perfectly good coffee onboard. It got us off the yacht, though, which was probably a good thing, although Elaine wasn’t entirely convinced. It didn’t help matters that she’d undertaken her morning walk earlier than she would normally and couldn’t take her mask off, given the number of people that were still out and about. Not getting a coffee then just made for a bothersome morning.
After her lovely walk today, however, she was in the mood to tackle a number of filing activities, including clearing out outdated or obsolete instruction manuals and booklets, given that some equipment onboard has been replaced, as well as sorting through a pile of paperwork to throw out items no longer needed, like old medical insurance claims, etc.
Roy decided he needed a break today from, not only the heat and the sun, but the yacht projects and, instead, spent his day indoors working on his Anchor Plus application, as well as baking Elaine another batch of gluten-free muffins.
While it may appear that all we do is eat freshly baked delights on Paw Paw, these delights freeze well, so, in an effort to keep our weight under control while we lounge around waiting to set sail to somewhere, anywhere, we’ve significantly reduced what we consume in a day, specifically lunch; a small portion of fruit does the trick and in many instances, given the size of the mangoes for example, a half a mango and half an apple is all we can manage.
A video of William playing Flag Football and another of the twins compiling music in dad’s car and singing to their works of art started our day in the best possible way and ended with takeaways from another of our favourite restaurants, the Kapitan. Deserved after a very long week! It was hard to believe we were watching footage of Keenan’s son playing Flag Football when it didn’t seem like that long ago we were watching Keenan play after moving to Arizona in 1998 / 1999.
That aside, we have noticed a number of yachts arriving, apparently being delivered from Pangkor marina further down the coast, for their rendezvous with a cargo ship taking yachts through the Suez Canal and back to the Mediterranean, the yacht owners deciding they would rather have their yachts back in their home countries versus completing a circumnavigation after a 1-2 year hiatus because of the pandemic and having got settled back on land. Our hope, however, is that we will be able to continue our sailing adventures in the not too distant future.
