It has been a week since we returned to Leu Cat from our holiday visit to the States. It is time now to settle down and get serious about making a dent on the boat project list. As I mentioned yesterday, you really can only work during the morning hours since by noon it is just too hot to be working outside. Thus, I rolled up my sleeves, grabbed my two new tachometers and went to work this morning.

Last year I had problems with both of my tachometers while cruising through the Indonesian islands. By the time we reached Singapore, both had stopped working and we were estimating the engine speed by judging how far we had moved the throttles and by listening to the engines.

When we were at the Puteri Harbor Marina, I had an engine mechanic come out to determine the problem with the tachometers. With the starboard one, he discovered that the tachometer was faulty and needed to be replaced. He had hoped that an old man he knew could take it apart and fix it. Unfortunately, that did not happen. On the port tachometer, he discovered that the problem was a faulty wire and connection near the engine. He fixed that and everything was great for the first few days. Then that tachometer just shut down as we motored from the Singapore area up to Langkawi. Once again, we set the engine speed by how far we moved the throttles and the sound of the engines.

While in the US, I bought two new tachometers from Yanmar and carried them like gold with us back to the boat. This morning I wired them in place, turned on the engines and was delighted to see the needle on the tachometer move to show the RPMs the engines were turning on. Boy, what a joyful sight that is after all of those days of motoring, guessing at what our engine speeds were!

As an added benefit, the engine hour meter within each tachometer is working again. While the meters are each only showing 0.1 hours. Keeping track of your engine hours is very important since servicing it is based on the engine hours run. I use our blog as our records document for how we run the engines and for how long and for documenting our maintenance issues. At this time of changing out our panel gauges we had 1120.9 hours on the port engine and 1044.6 hours on the starboard engine.

I see our daughter, Christina, was critical of how I ended yesterday's blog. She wanted me to tell of the things we did in the afternoon. I had thought by now you all would be bored of hearing our afternoon routine repeated in each blog. However, to keep Christina happy, both yesterday and today I once again grabbed my Cuban, along with a nice iced Manhattan and sunglasses and strolled over the resort side of the island. My shady hammock was beckoning me. It is so nice and restful and I laid in it enjoying life and the scenic view of the ocean and multiple islands that lie off of the shore. After about an hour of this heavenly delight, I then strolled over to the pool and did about a dozen laps, each of about 24 meters in length.

While swimming in the pool I saw an interesting sight. Malaysia is about 60% Muslim and many of the women here wear a burqa, which is a full body black garment, when in public. We have seen a few such women here at the resort. I had wondered if they ever go swimming, given their modesty. Well, today that question was answered. The answer is yes, they just go swimming in their burqa! Thus, at the same time I was surround by women in skimpy bikinis and one that was covered in black from head to foot!

While I was enjoying the resort's amenities, Mary Margaret decided to stay on board cool Leu Cat and watch a few of the DVDs we bought in the US.