From Thailand to Greece: A Sailing Trip Full of Mishaps: Workin' in the Maldives

Now we were in paradise. The Maldives is where the rich and famous come to pay up to $5000 per night to stay at amazing 7-star resorts. Almost all the islands near Male' are private resorts, and the diving and snorkeling is world famous.

We start working immediately. The Captain and Diny have a successful first day and find a canvas furniture maker to repair the sail. They find a business that will build the stainless steel diesel tank, as well. Unfortunately, at this point I feel The Captain makes a crucial decision. He doesn't even look into getting skilled (but cheap) labor to cut out the old diesel tank, instead he has CJ and Sarah do the dirty, nasty and toxic job. For 5 days, they crawl in the bilge and burn through 3 grinders cutting it out. The boat was a disaster and we all had to live with the mess and fumes. By now we were so used to having the bilge exposed, that the boat became a constant building project.

Around this time Susie begins to act mysterious. She is talking on the cell phone, allegedly coordinating a dive trip for CJ, Diny, Sarah and I.

After a week of working on the boat, we all take a break by paying to go to a resort for the day.

Holly does "crunches" at the beach and snorkels, and Sarah gets a much deserved rest from boat work. Below: Our day room at the resort.

We leave on an 8:00am boat and leave the resort island at 5:00pm. We each paid $35 for the privilege of laying on a beach which included lunch and a room where we took showers and washed our clothes. We lounged and snorkeled, but the day of relaxation flashed by. It was disappointing to have to pay extra for what we thought we were going to experience on this trip whenever we wanted it. We had been aboard now for one month, and not had one beach day or day off. We were desperate for some of what we all had been saving for and looking forward to for over a year. At the resort, I overheard Susie making an appointment for the next day. Sarah and I asked her outright if she was looking for a job, and she told us she was leaving the boat as soon as she received an answer on two prospects. She knew midway across the India Ocean that things were not going to get better. Her boyfriend and another friend told her back in Phuket that she shouldn't go...they saw the projects we were working on and the general condition of the boats' systems, and predicted a voyage very different from what Susie had been expecting.

The diesel tank took longer than expected to be built of course, but when it was finally finished, all of us took the ferry into Male' to pick it up and get it onto the ferry then onto a dingy then onto BOAT X. It was quite an operation and we literally winged it without much of a plan, but it worked. We got the tank onto the boat, through the hatch, but, well, of course it didn't fit into the bilge where it needed to go. Apparently The Captain didn't measure correctly. He was mostly worried about getting it through the hatch onto the boat, and thought it would just slide right into the spot. But they built the boat around the tanks, originally. To make a long story shorter, it took about another week to get it in (after cutting planks out of the sole) then had to work for about 4 days trying to get the fittings on. There wasn't enough room above the tank to get the intake hose on, so poor CJ was behind the tank for days trying to make it work.

Neighbors from a dive boat help us get the tank from the ferry dock to BOAT X in their hard and large dingy

They finally got it to work, but by this time Sarah and I had decided to leave the boat. At first we were going to get off in India, but things only got worse and we decided to cut our losses and get off as soon as possible.

We moved off the boat into Male' and went diving for the next two days. We made friends, shopped, read, relaxed, and made arrangements to fly to India to go to a Yoga Ashram, then to explore Southern India.