Another "new" post now that we have internet
02 December 2014 | Telaga Marina, Langkawi
partly cloudy
It's now Sunday and we've moved twice since the last post. With the tides controlling when we could leave our anchorage on Saturday, we talked on the radio and decided to take off much earlier than we had planned as we wanted to get to the anchorage at "Hole in the Wall"(06 25.262N 99 52.007E). The tide was falling but with some quick calculations, we would still be leaving on a bit higher tide than when we came in and we saw "0" on our depth gauge at one area was we came in. So we both quickly started our engines and hauled up our anchors and headed out of the bay we'd been in. We'd thought to go out on the afternoon tide as it was going up but instead went out on tide going down. That can be risky is you just happen to run aground.
Our calculations we spot on and we got out just fine. We rounded the headland to the north of us and made our way around a whole 9+ miles to "Hole in the Wall". We saw several "holes" in the rock formations as we went but we never saw any "big" hole that would make it be named what it was. The entrance to the bay is quite narrow and has a sheer rock wall on both sides so maybe that's the "hole". As we made our way closer to the entrance, we were surrounded by tourist boats. They were everywhere. All stuffed to the gills with tourists. Mainly Muslim people with the women all dress in head scarfs and some in full Muslim gowns with only their eyes showing. The men were all in long pants. I was in shorts and a tee shirt and was sweating like a pig. They must have a different genetic makeup from "westerners".
If you're looking for a nice quiet scenic place to spend a day or three, "Hole in the Wall" is not it. While it is scenic, the waves made by the continual tour boats passing as close as they could to our boats some times made for a rocky anchorage. One boat came close enough to Solstice that water sprayed in one of his side windows. In the early afternoon, Bill came over in his dinghy and we went exploring. Out the cut in search of a beach to walk and play on. Well again, there were numerous tour boats zipping around stirring up the water. Just outside the cut to the anchorage, there is a huge sign pounded into the rock cliff promoting the "Kilimi Geoforest Park". After a bunch more exploring by dinghy, we came to the place the tour boats left from and found the main base for the "Geoforest" excursions. There were dozens of boats all either loading or unloading their guests. You could take either a 1, 2, 3 or 4 hour tour in these boats and there were hundreds of people there to go on the tours. The road from Kuah, the main city on the island comes right to it and since it was Saturday, well, lots of people showed up for the rides. It made anchoring a lot less fun than we had expected, especially since we had come down in our dinghy just the day before and had seen few boats like we were seeing today but again, that was on a Friday, not a Saturday.
We made plans to move along today and head for another anchorage on the east side of the island making our way slowly back to Telaga Marina where we have reservations for slips on Tuesday. We again motored(little wind) and were in our new spot by noon. We've now dropped anchor off the east coast of Palau Timun at 06 18.737N 99 55.756E in a nice little bay.