Merry Christmas

Hello from wet and cool Vancouver. We had a good flight home and arrived on the 10th as planned. It is great to be back and visiting our old friends and now having our daughter Natalie and grandsons Liam and Declan visiting us in our rented abode overlooking the ocean here in Ocean Park. It is the first time we have met Declan who is a very happy baby four months old. We will be having our three childrens families over for Christmas so will have a house full with six grandkids under eight years old. Should be a lot of fun.

We wish all of our friends a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Rebak Marina Langkawi Island

Our time in Penang at Straits Quay Marina was great. We had five Canadian boats out of thirty on the dock and met some great people. Penang grew on us as we spent more time there. We found some wonderful small places tucked into the surrounding chaos of the city. One was a restaurant called China House which had great food, Marian had the lobster thermadore, and the selection of cakes was amazing and good! One of the boats with Jim and Charlene are from Calgary and live only houses away from Natalie. Small world. They had  been there for awhile and had a car. They drove us around the island and we had lunch at a great little seaside place with very good food. Sea Mist arrived and it was great to see John doing so well after his hip surgery. He is walking about in a normal fashion and is out of the pain he was in. Well after eleven days it was time to leave and move on towards Langkawi. You could only leave the marina at high tide as it is silting in badly so we went at two in the afternoon. Even with the high tide of 2.0 we still saw the depth sounder hit the 00 mark. No problem as it is just silt and we just plowed through. That evening after seventeen miles we anchored by a small island and had a reasonable evening although rather hot after all the a/c we had gotten used to.

Next morning we were off at daybreak and had a nice sail up to Langkawi island. The area here is much different than what we have seen in Malaysia so far with lots of small islands with views like what you would see in a tourist brochure. The water is much cleaner and we were able to make water on the way up. We arrived in Rebak Marina around three in the afternoon. This place is on a small island just off Langkawi and the marina is part of a five star resort so very nice. We managed to find the pool for a swim and then happy hour to meet up with some fellow cruisers. We now have been here for four days and have done most of the boat jobs and enjoyed the quiet of being in a jungle as the marina is surrounded by it with the resort cut into the area. This place was badly damaged in the tsunami of 2004 with all the docks being ripped out. Hopefully that will not happen again especially when Kilkea is here.

We are off tomorrow for KL and then Hong Kong for an overnight and then to Vancouver. We are very excited to get home and to see all the family. It will be great to see our newest grandson Declan who will be four months old when we meet him. It has been a very long and busy year sailing from New Zealand to Malaysia. I don't know how many miles but around six to seven thousand seems about right. It has been a lot of fun but it will be good to get off the boat and do some other things for a few weeks as we are rather burnt out. Having said that I imagine that we will really looking forward to coming back in January for some more cruising in Thailand.