Happy 2009... It was a quiet celebration here on Blue Moon as we counted down to midnight along with the party on the huge mega yacht 'Asean Lady' who's moored to the outside dock near us here in Raffles. Our plans have changed back and forth many times in the past few days, whenever we feel close to getting the engine fixed we dream about the next leg of the trip through to the Red Sea...but when we hit yet another set back we have to face the realization that we may have to stay in Asia for another year!
Our cruising friends in Thailand are all preparing to leave, they've re-stocked all their food and fuel, made sure the rigging is safe and everything on board is ready to head back into the big blue. For us we feel confident that the boat is ready; we just have replace the piece of rigging wire between the two masts and stock up on food, fuel and water, get the new computer chips for our chart plotter...oh and of course have an engine that runs!!
Time is our main worry now as the group is planning to leave Phuket in Thailand around the 15th of January to head to Sri Lanka, it would take us roughly a week to get up the coast of Malaysia to the duty free port of Langkawi where we would stock up on everything (much cheaper than here in Singapore) before a two day jump to Phuket. Obviously that doesn't leave us any time to see any of the islands and that would only work if we were underway by this coming Tuesday!
As for the engine the current update is that we are without a transmission at the moment, it's a long story but we hired yet another mechanic to find the cause of the grinding, rattling, knocking noise that we get when it's in gear. This guy is very sure that the problem is the clutch plate which he thus removed, however, instead of ordering the same kind to put back he somehow convinced us to get a dampener plate instead which is having to be manufactured by an engineering firm here. So at a 'much' larger expense we've decided to trust him in the hope that this will fix all our worries...except he doesn't seem to realize how much of a rush were in and keeps making the time frame longer...ahhhh!
To be honest we really don't know if this is causing the problem but there's nothing else we can do, Jimmy has already had to lower the v-drive unit as the yard never aligned it correctly as they seemed to think aligning it to the hole in the hull where the shaft goes through was adequate...not according to every other engineer we've spoken to!!
So as I'm sure you can imagine we're going absolutely crazy..we've been here over two months and feel no closer to completion than when we arrived, fingers crossed 2009 will be a little luckier for us and we'll be underway soon.
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