A night in Sigaboy.
08 July 2013 | In the Davao Gulf
Bill
We pulled into Sigaboy about 1400, after moving our clocks back another hour. We're now at UTC+8 hours. We just keep getting farther and farther away from the US. We'd never planned on visiting the Philippines but now that we are here we have lots of exploring to do. After the anchor was down, we were greeted by old men, young men, teenagers, and kids alike. No women on board. One teenager spoke quite good English and had lots of questions--Where did you come from? How long did it take you? What islands have you visited? and many more. He even asked if they could row around our boat. Shortly after telling him we were headed for Davao, a much older man asked if we would take him there. We had to explain that we were actually just going farther up the Gulf. They all stayed around us for what seemed like hours looking at all of the equipment on board. A nice breeze made it's way through the anchorage. We spent the rest of the afternoon resting, napping and playing a game of Scrabble. About 1700 the town lit it's fires and the bay was quickly covered in smoke. Dense smoke from all their cooking fires. Fishermen came and went throughout the rest of the day and lots during the night. The smoke got so dense we finally put on masks to make breathing easier. Guess they are used to it. Finally a bit of a breeze came through and most of it was gone.
We sat in the cockpit watching another episode of Downton Abbey(season one) and had our mosquito coil burning with us. While not that many mosquitos, there are small bitting bugs that just love Tracy. Don't seem to bother me at all. This being our first time in the Philippines, we have no idea what, or if there is any kind of crime in the islands so we set up a cockpit watch for the night as we sat lazily at anchor. I took the 2100 to 0100 watch but we started on an unchanged clock where it was actually only 2000. OOPS. Because of that, Tracy came up at 2400. I was sound asleep in the cockpit. Gee--what a surprise. I just got too comfortable I guess. I headed below to finish my nights sleep with Tracy on watch. Nothing happened and no one came anywhere near us. With us starting the night at the wrong time, we were up early before the Sun was even up so we just pulled up the anchor and took off shortly after 0500. The final stretch for the Holiday Oceanview Marina.
There are tons of fishing boats around us as we make our way farther North in the Gulf. With so many boats out for so many generations, I'm amazed that there are still plenty of fish in the Gulf.
We have just about 40 miles to go and should be in by early afternoon. The tide is now going out so we will be fighting an out going current for the rest of the trip North. I'll let you know when we finally get in and settled. Still more to come.