We dropped the lines to the dock just after seven AM and took off hot on the heels of another cruiser that is also heading for Puteri Marina in Johor Bahru. We got lucky and picked up the last few hours of a good current letting us zip along in the high 7 knot range for most of the trip.

As we headed south along the coast, we had to zig and zag every now and then as we came across several nets across our path. We alway stay on watch because sometimes there are fishermen out here and sometimes, just their nets left to drift in the current. Our track on the chartplotter has lots of sudden course changes.

With the current running so well for us, we pulled into Palau Besar just before one o'clock. As we dropped the anchor in twenty feet of water, the depth came up to 1 foot! We looked over the side and couldn't see the bottom but we did see a huge jelly fish swimming by. It was a foot across with long tentacles streaming off it's bottom. I put on my suit and dove in with Tracy watching for more. I couldn't see anything coming up close to us so it must have been the jelly fish that upset the depth sounder. I did find a length of line wrapped around the propeller that took me a couple of attempts to get off. There's all kinds of things floating in the water here. We've seen tens of thousands of water bottles washed up on beaches we've explored and more chunks of styrofoam than we can count. heaven help our beaches in the future with all the water bottles that are floating out here. The natives think nothing of just throwing their trash in the water as they fish. It's a mess sometimes out here.

Tracy went below and made a lunch of chicken, noodles, onions and garlic and just two of the small birds eye chilis that can be found in every grocery store in Southeast Asia. Let me tell you, they may be small but the heat they gave off was way over the top. Even I, a heavy spice kind of guy had to eat a bit, drink a bit, eat a bit, drink a bit. It was over the top with heat. We see people in the markets buying bunches of these birds eye chilis and we can't imagine what the heck they do with them since they are so hot. Yesterday, Tracy made a dish with sliced strip loin, potatoes, really small onions that are almost like shallots, and garlic. She added birds eye chilis[one green and two red] to that meal and it wasn't as hot as todays was with just two. She did add some curry to todays meal to put a bit more flavor to it but it wasn't even hot curry. Next time, take out some of the seeds and then we will see. Two days ago when we were in one of the markets in Port Dickson, we saw a couple of women with grocery bags filling them with the dried red chilis that we Americans buy in small bottles to add to pizza. These were entire chilis just needing to be crushed. Oh, they must love their hot foods out here.
Yesterday, about nineteen hundred, we put on our swimming suits and headed for the pool at the club house for the marina. The pool is shared with the big resort next door and is normally well attended by Muslims that are vacationing here. I only saw one Muslim woman in the pool when I went to see how busy it was and she was dress in the traditional Muslim dress with the head dress allowing any one to see just her eyes. Other than her, I saw lots of kids in the pool, some in Muslim swim suits[covers just about everything] but no other women or teenagers were in the water. When we got there, it was almost dinner time and most left for their rooms to get dress for dinner. When we went in the water, there were two other men swimming. Neither would go near Tracy in her one piece swim suit. You would have thought that she was giving off toxic chemicals. If she swam any where near them, they immediately swam the other way. Oh, the cooties she must have been giving off. We swam for about thirty minutes and then headed for the showers{cold water only].
Tomorrow, we have a long day ahead of us, needing to cover about seventy miles to Pisang. It's our last stop before we round the corner and head up the river to Puteri Marina. I called them yesterday and made reservations. Good to be prepared.