Once I had found a new home for Milli, our boat kitty, I suddenly felt like I didn’t have much of a purpose for staying in the shipyard. My job onboard had somehow become the master organizer and I spent most of my days tidying up the mess that occurred daily because if people can’t find tools, they can’t do the work. Despite my efforts, things still got lost on an hourly basis and I was constantly finding items in the wrong places, like drill bits in the fruit bowl and the screwdriver in the shoe bin. Organizing was both satisfying and constantly frustrating.
The weather began getting hotter and hotter as summer approached which meant more frequent rain showers. Sunny days were typically followed by a few good downpours, lasting only 30 minutes or less. The tools and other items left on deck would often get forgotten and ruined or develop rust that stained the newly painted benches. Unfortunately, everything inside was also at risk of getting wet since the windows had some serious leaks causing a steady flow of water down below.
Despite living onboard for almost two months, the to-do list never seemed to get any shorter. There always seemed to be “two more weeks” worth of work before leaving the shipyard. Every project started several more as we continued to uncover more work that needed to be done. Eventually, the things left to be fixed or done were categorized into “before splashing” and “after splashing” as we focused our efforts on the critical path items because now there was a new deadline in place: Ramadan.
Ramadan is a month-long period of fasting and prayer for Muslims. Since Malaysia is a Muslim country, we heard rumors that almost everything would be shutting down and the shipyard would go silent. Nate put pressure on the contracted laborers to finish up their work while Amy and I spent two days provisioning. Since most Muslims would be fasting, we were unsure to what extent grocery stores would be open and stocking food. We also weren’t sure how many restaurants would be open and if having lunch delivered would still be an option. We treated the start of Ramadan as a hard deadline to get the boat in the water and continued working day after day but it became clear we would not be splashing in time.
Ramadan began on March 23 and was rung in by the extra enthusiastic prayers on the loudspeakers at the nearby mosques. Luckily, things didn’t shut down as much as we expected and the work continued, only with limited lunch options. Luckily, Langkawi has enough tourism that the entire island didn’t shut down as we had expected.
By this point, we were all starting to burn out and lose momentum. It was easy to stay motivated when working towards a specific date but when that day is constantly pushed out, our group morale dipped lower and lower. Then, Nate hit us with some big news, we would have two weeks off the boat and be free to do whatever we wanted. Plus, about half of the crew was close to the end of their 90-day visas and needed to leave the country anyway so he figured some time away from the boat would do us all some good.
While I understood Nate’s thinking in hoping some time away could revitalize us, he failed to realize it could also completely deflate any momentum we had left. All any of us wanted to do was get the boat in the water and taking two weeks off felt more like an insult than a gift. For Angi, she took it as a sign that it was time to move on to other opportunities and we all began questioning if we would be coming back after the two weeks.
With just a couple of days to plan a two-week trip, our final days were spent looking at flights and accommodation to see if we could each plan a reasonably affordable, last-minute trip. Nate, Amy, Angi, and Rob would head back to Australia, Aitor back to Spain, Will and Joni to Sri Lanka, and Jules to the Philippines. Candice and I decided that we wanted to travel together but had no idea where. Instead of planning the trip, we decided to let the trip plan itself and call it the “Path of Least Resistance”.
