Perry

Who: Matt, Jen, Conrad & Mark
Where: The Maldives
Boat: Privilege 482
Blog: www.svperry.com

We love the Maldives. It probably has to do with the plentiful white sand beaches, clear water, and tons of fish, rays, sharks, turtles, and dolphins. It’s true that lots of the coral is dead and that Covid makes it so we can’t go to most of the inhabited islands, but we’re having a great time anyway. Matt’s been re-honing his pole-spear fishing skills. Even though his preferred spear tip rusted through and he’s been using one that doesn’t hold onto the speared fish quite as well, we’ve been well fed with fresh fish. We spent a week in Hulhumale and Male to stock up on fresh provisions and other sundries and, more importantly, wait for a package to replace a slowly failing instrument. One of our least favorite parts of cruising is waiting for boat parts in remote places. And Hulhumale is not where we would choose to spend a lot of time. It’s a nice enough city/island but the anchorage is hectic, and the water is dirty (it was amazing how much growth was on our bottom after just a week). We finally got our package (it took over a month to get here, but we consider ourselves lucky). Of course, Matt installed the new instrument and unfortunately it had an issue and didn’t work. Good thing our old one is still mostly functional. Refusing to wait another month for a new delivery, we high-tailed it out of the big city as soon as we could and are enjoying snorkeling and swimming again. At the appropriately named «Dolphin Lagoon,» we enjoyed swimming with the local spinner dolphins. We were able to get much closer than normal, probably due to the fact that they are used to the dozens of boats a day that bring tourists to see them up close. We have a lot of ground to cover to get to Gan in time to check out and position ourselves for our passage to Chagos. So, we keep moving south, swimming the reefs as we go. If you have ever found yourself wondering what we do all day, boat repair and maintenance are still high on the list. It’s not all sunshine and the-oceanis-our-aquarium, but we’re not complaining!