On Friday after the race, Roy enjoyed a long chat to Lucie and Roger, off Catamini, regarding their sailing seasons in SE Asia over the years that they’ve been in this part of the world. That meant he was a tad rushed to squeeze in his errand for the day; walking to Cold Storage to stock up on our fresh produce, with the usual sanitation exercise required before stowing everything. While Roy was out, though, Elaine ensured nothing went to waste on Paw Paw; her old “boat dresses” were cut up to serve as cleaning clothes. Later in the day, Roy had barely left to collect our takeaway dinner from the Kapitan restaurant when the heavens opened. He was completely drenched just walking the short distance back to Paw Paw from the entrance to the mall, where he had been dropped off by a young man who had offered Roy a ride back to Straits Quay. While delighted with the offer, there was that initial “COVID-19 hesitation” of getting into a car with an unknown person, but the well-spoken young man was, not only kind enough to extend the offer and was wearing a mask, he too was, in fact, exposing himself. It was a poignant moment indeed! The rain, however, was a welcome relief from the heat. Fortunately, we’ve had an additional downpour since then which has helped keep the soaring temperatures somewhat under control, but, more importantly, saved us the time and energy of having to wash the decks. Apparently these thunderstorms are a regular occurrence at this time of the year during the transition period of the monsoons.
On Friday we also received the news that Mount Sinabung in the North Sumatra province had erupted again, shooting smoke and ash as high as 1,000 metres into the air and hot ash clouds being blowing 3Km to the southeast, thankfully in the opposite direction to where we are located from Sumatra.
After the Americas Cup races on Saturday, we tackled one of our most important projects onboard; checking and carrying out maintenance on our steering system, as neither of us ever want a repeat of our passage from New Zealand to Fiji. Once that was completed, Elaine continued work on our next video in the Malaysian series, while Roy continued his testing efforts on the Anchor Plus application. We were also delighted to receive a few more spares, including our spare alternator. The highlight of the day, though, was a video chat with Elaine’s siblings.
Unfortunately the Americas Cup races were cancelled yesterday due to light winds, so Elaine took advantage of the extra time in her day to do her stretch exercises on the transom before we tackled the gas leak in our starboard air-conditioning unit; something we discovered a year ago, but it was not a priority project. We definitely had the fire extinguisher on hand, though, to be sure, to be sure, given the open flame required to make the repairs.
Afterwards, being Mother’s Day in the UK, Elaine took the rest of the day to herself. However, we couldn’t help but notice that the promenade was absolutely heaving, with very limited social distancing and a splattering of masks being worn, from what we could observe, to the point that we thought it might well be Mother’s Day in Malaysia too. Research revealed that it wasn’t, so it’ll be interesting to see what the COVID-19 numbers look like over the next week or two. Nonetheless, Happy Mother’s Day to all those fabulous mothers out there!
With the races back on today, the laundry chore as well as Elaine’s walk was left to the afternoon, following which we both spent the rest of our day working on our respective projects.
