We arrived in Singapore on the 21st of October and spent a good week at Marina at Keppel Bay, our old hangout, where we met up with friends and family, collected the mail (!), refueled and provisioned. It was nice to be back but also better to be on our way again - we enjoy the sea road!

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Alex (Atol) at SAF who is a well established delivery captain taking up a Lagoon 440 to Pattaya - some good chats and laughs before he headed out with the new boat owner and his family.

Here's a lesson: if you mail order a package in from overseas to Singapore and it spends more than 20 days in the postoffice, they return it to sender. Yep, we had this infortune for our solar strobe lights (an anchoring aid). The fundamental reason for this was that we paid with Paypal and thus the expeditor will only mail to the credit card billing address which in our case was our rented apartment and the tenants didn't collect the parcel (fair enough) and while I knew this at the time I had thought a few days at the PO wouldn't be an issue. No so! Lessons learned.

Our passage plan for sailing the Malacca straits includes day sailing only to Langkawi with a nr of stop overs to visit some of the towns and ports along the way. This is our first passage along one of the world's busiest shipping lanes which is frequented with numerous fishing boats of varying types and thus we decided not to take the added risk of night sailing in this region. Staying a few hundred meters east of the traffic separation route allowed us lots of sea room and minimal traffic. Imagine these straits use to strike fear in the hearts of sailors for its reputation of piracy. Today its all cleaned up and the biggest annoyance now is dodging nets, fish buoys and the fisherman - but they have purpose.

It's a little bit exciting to know that Emerald Sea is one of the millions of ships to have sailed down this historical route.

Our first anchorage after leaving Singapore on the 28th Oct was Pulau Pisang where there were two other sailboats hooked down for the evening on the southern side in 2.5m water with good holding. We weighed anchor at 04:00hrs and back into the straits toward Malacca with a mix of changing winds approx 12-18kt. We managed to fly our gennaker for a few hours - always a treat and knocked off a few items from the PMS (planned maintenance system) list.

Our next anchorage was SW of Malacca Town behind Pulau Besar, an island with a golf course. We arrived at 18:00 and laid down the anchor to a pretty sunset, cool glass of wine and good nights sleep.

Our next stop we decided to take in a marina...Admiral Marina just south of Port Dickson and an opportunity to clear into Malaysia also. Nice marina but with a approach that is quite narrow and exposed. Berthing was a bit tricky with a bit of maneuvering about but no dings!! The staff here are excellent and the facilities great with pool, pub (happy hour ½ price at 17:00hrs) and quite a few cruisers. It's a 15min taxi to Port Dickson and 1.5hrs to Malacca.

Good news is our AIS is functioning normally again and the GPS isn't popping out when it decides too. The Raymarine fix while in Singapore was to turn it off at the Smart Control unit and back on again (hard boot). He ran me thru the complete restart system, made some notes. Sure they did some diagnostics but Im not convinced there is not an underlying reason for this fault.

A few months back we had the Rule float switch fail (3 months old, leaked water into its electronics) and partially flooded the stbd hull. That was a wakeup call! I had delivered our new bildge pump system which I'll install in the weeks to come; Jabsco 36600 diaphram pump connected to a Ultra Safe Systems Senior float switch and high water alarm (www.tefgel.com). One for each hull. Slowly I will rebuild this boat with reliable systems!

I have booked PSS Satun in Thailand to haul out Emerald Sea for re-painting (anti fouling), repair a small hole in the bow (temporarily repaired with underwater epoxy, anode replacements and have a davit system fabricated for lifting the outboard - before it breaks my back!!

Other work while in Spore: Sail Drive 60's had a recall part from Yanmar installed. After 200+hrs on the SD's they have been behaving well ☺. The earlier oil leak turned out to be a broken o-ring on the breather pipe. Our oven door handle broke completely off and this was replaced (warranty). The clamshell scoops that snapped off while sailing will be replaced in Phuket.

And we continue!