This is the scariest part of cruising. No income and lots of expenses.
We bought a new dinghy outboard engine, a Suzuki 6 when we were in Port Klang. Our old Mercury was 16 years old. The choke was broke, the locking mechanism was broke so the outboard kept coming out of the water when in reverse, it idled too fast (probably because of the broken choke), the shut-off switch was broke. So it was time to buy a new one. The new one does not get us around as fast but no need for a prayer ritual before trying to start it.
We got brand new batteries, 6 Trojans in Langkawi. Our old ones were dying on us and we decided that we either change them or risk having one of the fridges burn up.
And just the other day, a friend with a boat for sale asked if we know any one interested in buying second hand stainless steel anchor chain. Well, we said yes, we would be interested. She said she had 60m of chain and as ours are a little worn, we said we would take it. After negotiating the price for 60m, we took the chain back to the boat. As we were measuring and marking the chain, we realized we only had 40m of chain. Oh, did we say that we had already cut our old chain? Well, we could not even return the 40m of chain so we asked for a refund of the missing 20m and make do with the 40m. We had kept 30m of our old chain so we joined them together and now we have only 70m of anchor chain. Just hope we don’t need to anchor in 20m of water. We gave away our old chain to a young family whose chain had rotted and was lost so I guess we are better off with 70 meters of good chain and helping them with 60m of pretty ok chain.
Someone said that we should not have a monthly budget but a yearly one. We believe the first month is out of control but kind of expected that. Next month should be better but will still be high. Then January and Feb includes a trip to the USA and Singapore so maybe we are up for some huge expenses for a while.
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