Sweating out a book between the monsoons

Sebana Cove, Malaysia is just across the Johor Strait from Singapore. It's in the jungle and it's hot and humid, the afternoon's rain shower hasn't begun yet. This isn't Somerset Maugham's cool, upland, tea plantation Malaysia. Down here at the southern tip of the peninsula the landscape is mile upon mile of palm oil plantation, and where the palms can't grow, jungle.
I live on a boat, an old steel sailboat, if you know boats she's a cutter. My wife and I have been circumnavigating for the last seven years and for the last two I've been writing a book. Today was a good day, a couple of thousand words got committed to memory stick. This isn't bad in a lifestyle where it can take all day to tighten two screws and buy a six-pack.
Actually I'm usually busy all day every day. I write for SAIL and Cruising World magazines and that and trying to beat Irene at tennis, and tightening those two screws, keeps me occupied. On the first day of the coming new year I'll become a bachelor for three weeks as Irene goes to visit her family in Holland. I have high hopes for getting a lot of writing done, amongst the varnishing of the Moose's floorboards and the painting of bulkheads. The last time she went to Holland I managed to almost kill myself. I was washing paint brushes in white spirits that I kept in an old drinking water bottle, it was labeled with the contents and a skull and crossed bones, but unfortunately I took a good swig in the dark. And I think that's a fine point upon which to close a new blog's first entry!