Uligamu to Rafushi

Some small changes

I have made a couple of changes to the post format to make it more journal-like, so we can better remember where we have been. Besides, there are a lot of islands here with names that have far too many vowels and consonants, so it’s even harder to recall the place names unless we track our progress every day.

And to help even more with that, my mate Claude and I have added Google Maps links to the places we have visited. Clicking any of the links should open Google Maps at the location where we have anchored.

The upshot is that there may be more posts. I have tried squeezing two weeks into one, but that seems a bit too heavy. So I will tweak the content length as we go, and if it gets boring, we will try something else. This post, for example, represents around 9 days of fannying around the Maldives.

24 – 26th March · Uligan

📍 Uligamu · 007°04.781′N, 072°55.155′E · Haa Alif Atoll

Uligan is not the Maldives you see on Instagram, unless looking through the lens of a social media channel trying to expose its less-glamorous side. This is the look of the Maldives that you may arrive at first, a place of function rather than fun, before being whisked away in air-conditioned comfort to a private resort where beer and even more air-conditioned comfort are freely available. Here, in Uligan (population 500), the streets are hot, the roads sandy, there’s plenty of industry, but there’s not much air conditioning, and there are no bars.

Alcohol sales and consumption outside of the tourist resorts in the Maldives are strictly forbidden. Here, it is as dry as the Atacama Desert. Our tip for cruisers is to stock up well before arrival. And our tip for boozy tourists is to go all-inclusive at one of the resorts, or go into rehab before getting here.

Although we had our Cruising Permit, we didn’t have our passports. We collected those the next day from Asad, after they had been stamped by immigration, at a cafe serving mango milkshakes. Asad and his colleague Hammad were continuing their fast post-Ramadan – an extra six days of fasting on top of the standard allocation. Consequently, the mango milkshake celebration was fairly one-sided in terms of food and drink.

Those extra six days of fasting are the six days of Shawwal and carry a special reward: the Prophet said that whoever fasts Ramadan and then follows it with six days of Shawwal is as if they fasted the whole year. Impressive determination, and it seemed that many people on the island were doing it.

We met Asad and Hammad later that evening at the beachside restaurant a little further south. They smartly timed their arrival for sunset and had pre-ordered their dinner. As soon as the sun went down, so did the food.

Fuel

Hammad delivered our fuel the following day on a small boat together with his colleague. They pumped it on board Jamala from a hose plunged into 200-litre drums, using an incredibly functional hand pump. One turn equals one litre, apparently. He turned that handle 450 times. The island stocks up on diesel at the start of the year, and, like everywhere, they sell it at the current market price. Fortunately for us, when we bought it, there had been a slight dip from the stratospherically high price just a few days earlier. It was still eye-bleedingly expensive, but anything that looks like a discount is a cause for celebration,

It turned out that Hammad’s colleague was, like many, also extending his fast. As soon as the sun dipped below the horizon, they came back to Jamala asking for a drink of water. The timing was a tad inconvenient – I was in the shower.

Later, our old friend, Frank on Windsong, arrived in the anchorage, so we went back to the same restaurant we went to with Asad and Hammad to catch up with him, hear about his more recent misadventures, and meet his new crew. His plan is (or rather was) to go to the Mediterranean via the Red Sea.

Money

To settle up the clearance and fuel bill, we went to Asad’s house the next day. He gave us a melon, a papaya, a drink and a tracker. We gave him cash. The tracker is a small device that we need to carry at all times until we clear back out at Gan, at the other end of the country. Where it sends its data and to whom remain unclear. We have lugged it around unplugged, so it is probably not sending much of anything. Besides, it only works on 220V, so anyone with a US power supply on board can’t use it. Its true function? Well, the charge for it is $6.66 per day.

After stocking up on eggs and a papaya at the local shop, we went back to Jamala and prepared to clear off the next day,

27 – 28th March · Dhapparu

📍 Haa Alif Atoll · 006°55.036′N, 073°13.679′E

Dhapparu is more like the Maldives in the brochure, but without the hotels. There was a plan to build a resort on the island, but things didn’t work out. Twice. For us, though, it did work out. Dhapparu was a great place to unwind following our passage from Thailand and all the activity in Uligan.

29 March – 2nd April · Rasfushi

📍 Haa Dhaalu Atoll · 006°42.859′N, 072°55.223′E,

Crystal clear water, a lively coral reef, fish and another chance to catch up again with Frank and his crew, Quentin and Romane.

Quentin kindly offered to cook dinner for us – lasagna two ways, one for the omnivores and one for the veggies. He emerged from the galley doing a nautical impression of Marco Pierre White, who made a sweaty head into a bit of a trademark. The food was good, the beer was welcome, and as always, it was good to catch up.

But most of the activity here was underwater. The clarity of the water here is really exceptional, although my photos probably do not do it justice. There is so much variety here, from the small to the majestic. On really clear days, many say that it’s possible to see as far as 20 metres deep. That could well be true.

And then the next few days were focused on some more determined fish hunting further out on the reef:

Of course, there has to be a Yin to the Yang to all this. The Yin was working on the watermaker. Having to go down to the engine room to switch the watermaker over to the tank has been a bugbear for years, so I decided to do a little watermaker engineering. This involved removing everything from the cockpit locker to access the watermaker control panel,l so I could install a permanent TDI sensor and rewire the solenoid to change the water flow on demand.

Now, there is no need to clamber down into the engine room to test the watermaker water and switch it to flow into the tank. I can now control it from the comfort of the galley with a fan blowing on my head. The payoff for this future luxury was the loss of around 2 kilos of body weight. When I wound myself out of the cockpit locker,  I had the sheen of a newborn baby, but in a much larger and uglier frame.

And, after most of the sweating was over, we invited Frank and the gang over for coffee and the day after, we were off to Hurasfaruhuraa.