Passion for Cruising

Untied at 9.45am on mirror waters, luckily only 32 miles today. A huge 60ft Sunreef cat from South Africa closely behind us, it is 3 storeys high! Just now we have been buzzed by the coastguard plane, the first we have seen since leaving Aus.
Approaching Malacca now at 2.30pm ,the big cat is three and a half miles ahead, and we have 8kts of true wind and we are doing 7-8kts through the water, great, but we have 1.8kts current against us! This is the story of the Malacca strait.44'E
The Malaysian coast here is totally industrial; we have passed two oil refineries and countless tankers. The actual Strait is a two way rush hour traffic jam of huge ships. The sky is yellow with pollution and my eyes sting! From now until past Singapore is pretty bad.
We arrived at the Marina just in time to complete formalities at 4.30pm
This Marina leaves much to be desired, we had a TERRIBLE night. The first 'sumatra' {a westerly storm} arrived at bedtime without warning. All crews were out on the dock doubling lines etc. The monos had to be one to a complete pen, tied to both sides as we were. The surge across our beams was a metre high, then some mooring cleats on the fingers let go, or even snapped right off!!!
It was a chaotic one and a half hours before it all subsided and we all collapsed in bed. But wait........at 2.30am another one hit. This time a Macgregor 26 , a locally owned boat in the next pen to us, broke his lines and drifted out towards the rocks on shore. Luckily, some of our chaps got it before it was written off. The damage was a crushed pulpit and general scrapes down the hull.
Sleep, at 5am for an hour or so, oh yes, I forgot to say that one of our lines snapped as well , which then nearly let our stern back onto the pontoon!. During all this , the actual main walkway down the centre was like a switchback ride as it waved up and down about a metre. Sadly this marina leaves much to be desired. The only remedy is to build a full rock seawall.