Hello from the Maldives. For those of you who haven't recently asked your rich and famous friends where they prefer to vacation, this is the place. A series of coral fringed atolls that grew up around long gone volcanoes, the Maldives are one of the lowest countries on Earth, consisting of thousands of tiny islands organized into little loops in the middle of the otherwise deep Indian Ocean.

I arrived here a few days ago aboard Reflections, the same boat I sailed on from Australia to Malaysia three years ago. It's a different crew this time, like a different season of Survivor. There are six of us, five Americans and one Dutch.

The star of the show, Reflections, at anchor in Male.

The crew. Left to right: Diny, Max (the skipper), Leigh (who was only with us in Thailand), Susie, Sarah, and Holly.

The boat had been out of the water for several months when we all came together in Phuket, Thailand to get started, and we spent two weeks getting her ready. Lots of projects, large and small. I worked on installing the propeller, installing a new autopilot and GPS system, installing a new faucet, and a dozen other projects that I probably don't remember. The worst was the autopilot: it took about 5 days to get all the cables run. When we finally put to sea, it actually worked, which was a big relief. So now we can tell the autopilot display, which is in the cockpit, what heading we want, and it talks to the computer (in the aft cabin closet) which talks to a gyroscope and sealed compass (in the same closet) and to a rudder position sensor and a rudder hydraulic (both under the aft cabin bed), and steers the desired course. It can also talk to our GPS and steer toward a waypoint. And of course all these little electronicky bits have power and data cables connecting them.

A quiet morning at anchor in Thailand. Sarah drools when she sleeps.

Our crossing from Thailand to Maldives was tough. Lots of problems with the boat. A leaky fuel tank (one of two) led to a couple of days of trying to get fuel out of the bad tank and into the good one and into any other containers. This left us with less fuel than we thought, so we calculated a schedule of sailing when the winds were strong enough and motoring when they weren’t that would get us to Maldives before we ran out of food or water. Originally, we were shooting for India, but the prevailing winds said otherwise, and advice from other boats that we were in contact with via radio said Maldives would offer any repair services we needed. It wasn’t really a close thing, we had plenty of food and water, but nonetheless, we were conserving: no showers, washing dishes in salt water; we even tried cooking noodles in sea water, but they were a bit to salty to repeat.

Diny is a great cook, even when we can barely spare a hand from holding on to the pitching boat to cook. She also serves as our nurse (which is her profession, in addition to being a professional raft guide and world tramping do-gooder). She's pretty cool, even though she's Dutch.

For the first couple of days, the winds were light, and we were moving along at a stately 3 kts, about walking pace (imagine walking from Thailand to India!!). At such low speeds and in such calm seas, we were able to swim behind the boat to bathe (with lines out to hold onto as needed), which works pretty well, but left our skin feeling pretty waxy after a couple of days.

The daily salt water bath. Good for the soul if not so great for the skin.


Dolphins visited us several times. The best was during one of my 4am to 6am night watches when a dolphin launched 10 feet out of the water, glowing green with bioluminescence. It looked like a glow in the dark toy.

Via radio, we were being promised good winds soon, but I was doubtful. The guy on the radio kept referring to the any-day-now arrival of the "Northeast Monsoon", which sounded ominous, but its hard to believe too much can happen when all of my prior experience in the Indian Ocean has been of very mellow seas. The sea was as calm as a mountain lake in the afternoon breeze: just a light chop. But one afternoon, just as I was about to recommend we start up the engine because we weren’t able to sail at the minimum speed to keep to our schedule, I noticed a line of innocuous looking clouds stretched across the sky. As they passed us, we got a couple of puffs, but the sky was clear behind them, and we thought we’d lose the wind as fast as it came. But the puffs became a breeze and the breeze became a wind, and over the next few days, the wind and the seas built and built. The wind never got over 20 kts (a nice sailing breeze), but further north the winds were stronger, and the swell they created was rolling down on us as 9-12 ft waves. Not bad, but not the most comfortable ride, either. We were making great speed towards the Maldives, and enjoying the sail. Mornings on the boat were quiet, each of us taking our two 2-hour watches (mine is from 4-6 am and pm) while others napped or did various jobs on the boat. In the afternoons we cranked up someone’s mp3 player to hear some music while dinner was prepared and served (one night on cooking, one night on dishes, 4 nights off).

Before the NE Monsoon arrived.

A view of the jibs. The round thing is the radar transceiver, mounted about halfway up the mast.

At some point during all of this, we started having power problems. Two of our four house batteries had gone bad, and in so doing, overworked and killed the other two. We had to run our small generater for most of the day to have enough power to run our systems. Then, during the biggest day of swells (about 10 days into the trip), the main sail ripped. So we put on our harnesses and went out on deck to bring it down and put up a smaller emergency sail. This was fun: climbing a few feet up the mast with the boat rolling around and waves higher than the pilot house bearing down from behind. Beautiful and engaging, and not all that dangerous (really, Mom). We were clipped onto the boat, and not once did I need that connection to stay aboard.

The end of it all was when we arrived in Male on day 11, and couldn’t get the engine started. Our power problems seemed to have spread to our starter battery. We tried to sail into the harbor, but there was a massive current, and without the mainsail, we just couldn’t quite get in. We could have sailed out of the strait and made another pass, but it would have meant for another night at sea in a low power situation, so in the end we radioed for a tow. A tug called Ox was dispatched and pulled us in. All in all, it was a tough cruise, trying to keep everything going, but we had some fun too.

Holly working on a sail change.

So, we’ve been in Maldives for about a week now, and I’ve spent most of that time inside the diesel tank underneath the floor of the boat with a grinder trying to get the damned leaky thing out. Sarah, Max and I have taken turns at it. We bundle up in coveralls, protective glasses, face mask, and earplugs, fold ourselves down into the bilge and then lay out inside the tank and then hold a grinder, all sparks and steel-ripping screams, a foot from our faces while we carefully cut the 100 gallon tank out, piece by piece. I say carefully because on top of the tank are various hoses and cables that can’t be cut, and underneath it is the fiberglass hull which, obviously, can’t be cut, and in between are our fingers and noses, which can’t be cut. After an hour or two, we switch out and go jump in the sea to cool off. We’ve made steady progress and should have it out in a day or two.

An old chestnut of cruisers is, "Cruising is going to exotic ports and working on the boat." So true. But I learn all sorts of new stuff, so I don't mind so much. However, I think I've learned enough on this trip.

Really, I think I've spent half the trip in the bilge.

Male (rhymes with volley), the capital of the Maldives, is a surprising place. Imagine an art deco-ish sort of town, populated by Muslims, and packed wall to wall on an island about 1 mile square. It's a pretty cool place, marred only by the inability to buy a beer (however on the resort islands you can get anything you want).

A few days ago, we took a break. The whole crew was picked up by a boat here in Male and taken to a tiny, one-resort island a few miles south for a day of snorkeling and napping. Saw some beautiful fish, some decent coral, and a lot of pasty Europeans on holiday. The best part was being able to shower just as long as I wanted. We all did some laundry as well and hung it out on the balcony of the room they gave us for a day. We were sort of the white trash coming to the resort with dirty finger nails and leaving rings in the bathtub.

Even lower-end resorts are pretty posh. The room they gave us for the day had a glass panel in the floor so we could see the fish swimming by underneath on the reef.

It seems like every island has a resort, this one is pretty typical, but there are some islands where locals live. I hope we get to anchor at some of both.

The crew is pretty tired. So's the skipper. It's hard to keep morale up when we've had to work so hard for over a month now, with really only a handful of days that could be called easy. But hopefully we have shaken out all the loose bits and will have a much easier cruise on the next leg. Today, Susie said she's staying here in Maldives (she's a dive instructor, so she can probably find work here), and Sarah and Holly said they're leaving in India. It makes me sad to see them go after we've been through so much together, but I can understand it. Everyone expected to work on the boat, but the effort required on this trip was definitely not in the brochure. So it goes with boats.

We’re here for a few more days. We have to finish getting the tank out, get the new tank in, provision, fix the main sail, solve our battery problems, and do a dozen other little tasks to get this boat ready to go again. Next stop will be Cochin, India, with a few anchorings along some of these beautiful atolls on the way. At least that's the plan.