Well, at least it was uncharted for us!

Our stop last night deserves some mention. There was a (supposedly) accessible river at a suitable spot on the coast that we thought we might be able to use to break the journey north. The only problem was that the charting was both sketchy and suspect, plus there were reports of silting in the four-mile stretch of river mouth. The river is used by local fishing boats, though, so we figured we should ibe able to get up it somehow with our lifting keel. We choose a track in based on the few charted soundings and entered at high tide, and though we were fine the depths were way off. This was a problem for us as we wanted to leave when the tide was much lower the next day. We started tracking the path the local boats were taking using our radar (they don’t have AIS) and found they were using a different, and hopefully better, channel.

Our anchorage for the night turned out to be a fairly fast flowing tidal river - 2.5kts on the ebb. No swimming then! We were a bit concerned as to whether our anchor would hold, but the sticky black river mud did a good job.

This morning we sat and watched the colourful local fishing boats heading up and down the river before we decided to try for an exit. Just after low water (on a rising tide) we edged our way into the much better local channel and had an easy exit. Phew!

Tonight we are anchored in a wide, sandy bay at Pangkor Island - just 5 miles from our finish point.