Tuesday, 30th June 2009

It is 5am in the morning and we appear to be the only ones on this wide expanse of what is called the South China Sea and as usual motor sailing and have been doing so for the past 12 hours with the wind, what little of it there is, directly on the nose. I am on watch and Dave hopefully having a few hours sleep as neither of us has had much more than a couple of hours sleep each day for the last four days.

On Saturday 20th June we motored for four hours to the southern end of Perhentian Besar and were joined there by Barbara & David on Baker Street in a beautiful anchorage along with a few other local fishing boats. David & Barbara went over to one of the local boats to see if they could buy some fish and came back rewarded. The fisherman refused to take any money but accepted half a dozen cans of sprite! We then had dinner on board their boat that night and so nice to have a meal of fish.

Next morning we motored the few miles over to the smaller Perhentian Island called Pulau Perhentian Khecil and anchored off the beach where there were a few low key resorts, restaurants etc. and met up with most of the rally boats who had travelled north from the Tiomans. Half of the rally boats for various reasons stayed on down in the Tiomans. We enjoyed swimming in the beautiful clean water and we all congregated on shore at around 6pm for sundowners on the beach to celebrate Lynne on Solan's birthday followed by a group of us going for dinner on shore.

The following morning (Monday) Baker Street and us motored around the top of Khecil and round the other side to do some snorkeling in the hope of swimming with some big fish but no such luck and the coral was nothing spectacular. We then headed back and anchored off the north western side of Perhentian Besar and had another long snorkel viewing some lovely fish and better coral than we have virtually seen since being up here. To our way of thinking the coral isn't that spectacular but then we were spoilt by the coral we saw at Makangai in Fiji and anything we have seen since then just cannot compete. Along with Baker Street we decided to leave that anchorage and head south for the night to Redang Island to give us a head start for the sail back to Terengganu the next day arriving there just before 7pm. I had made paella with chicken and prawns (which I had in the freezer) and David & Barbara came over for dinner.

We were up and away next morning at first light (7am) and motor sailed the whole 28 miles back to Terengganu arriving in the marina at 12.30pm. Had two goes at getting in the berth as the tide was roaring in but had lots of helpers on the pontoon to catch us. The next couple of days were spent doing repairs and a few other odd jobs, like diesel runs etc. and our repaired spinnaker arrived back from Malacca that day as well. We were also delighted to catch up with Linda & Chris on Gitano who were in the berth opposite us. We had dinner with them that night as they left early the next morning to do a 3 week land based trip to Vietnam. They are not going across to Borneo unfortunately and they may be doing the Red Sea crossing in January.

We left the marina early Thursday (25th) afternoon and headed down to Kapas Island (along with 8 others in the fleet) for the night and once there had a swim and we both gave the bottom of the hull a bit of a clean after having been in the marina which is in a river which is rather dirty, to say the least. Hull cleaning is a regular activity up here as in the warmer waters the algae and barnacles appear pretty quick and it is a job we need to do every 10 -14 days if we can to make the antifoul last a bit longer. We are hoping to get 3 years out of ours and think we will last until at least this time next year, maybe longer. Using International Micron 66 has been a good investment as some boats are lucky if their antifoul has lasted 12 months.

We up anchored at 6.50am on Friday, 26th June for our journey across the South China Sea to Santubong, Sarawak. Borneo. Over Friday and Saturday we had some good sailing with the motor basically only having to be turned on to charge the batteries and we did do a straight row of sailing with no motor for 23 hours. We spent Saturday night dodging oil wells, oil tankers and barges and oil platforms, plus dodging about 10 ships en route to Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Korea etc as we were passing over a shipping lane. One oil platform we passed within 100 metres, was on the Maxsea chart but was unlit and could only be seen when we shone a 2,000,000 watt candle power torch on it.

On Sunday we found when we had the motor on that the engine started to get a bit over heated and we discovered that there was water leaking out of the heat exchanger. On further inspection found that part of the rubber end caps on the heat exchanger had split and we don't have any spares. Dave was having little success with repairs using denzo tape (fine when there is no heat involved) and while doing a 14 hour motoring stint we were having to top up the heat exchanger with water every 20-30 minutes, so yesterday morning at 3am we were sitting there doing, we hoped a good mend, with some tape we had on board. Got the caps on and all looked good but as we were getting along nicely we did not need to start the motor. By 5.15am the wind had come around to the NW and we were in the middle of a storm with 30-35 knots of wind and hurtling along at between 7.5 -8.5knots. By 8am it had died and we were back to motoring and once again we had the heat exchanger overheating but we had stopped the leaks. At 9am each morning we have a sched on HF (SSB) radio so we asked if anyone had any suggestions as to what the problem could be. Dave suspected an air lock in the line. Several suggestions were made - faulty thermostat or an air lock in the lines to the water heater. So Dave removed the thermostat - no joy there so then disconnected the lines to the water heater and put another line in that circulated back to the heat exchanger by doing that we hit the jackpot. Baker Street and Te Wai Pounamu are a day behind us so were standing by in case we needed assistance and needed a tow if we could not fix the problem so we were pleased that we did not have to call on their assistance. We went through two more storms yesterday morning before the weather settled down and in between them had no wind at all. We ended up having rain most of the day yesterday from 10am but by evening it had stopped and we have been constantly motor sailing since 5.30pm last night.

We have sailed passed several groups of islands and one would think that they would all belong to Malaysia but in fact they belong to Indonesia. We have all kept a wide berth from the Amambas Islands as apparently if you are within 30 miles of them you are quite likely to be boarded by so called officials who approach in uniform and then change into normal clothes and demand money, alcohol etc. Last night we came between a group of Indonesian Islands which were only 10 miles apart and looked deserted but got a surprise to hear my cell phone alert me of 6 messages - one from Leith and the rest were from either the Indonesian or Malysian cell phone companies advising of roaming charges, what they had to offer etc. Needless to add I didn't bother using my phone. Even the most deserted places seem to have cell phone coverage - both NZ and Australia could learn a thing or two from these countries.

After one of the storms we found we had a small fish on one of the three fishing lines we have running behind us. We thought we may have caught our pet, a small fish that has been living on our keel since before Thailand and had decided to leave us!! The fish we caught is apparently a ramora and one side of his head looks as though it is a foot print - a long, thin black fish with normal gills plus the third set on top. Not a lot of meat but I made a coconut fish curry out of it for dinner last night and was quite tasty.

Several of us take turns at doing the 9am morning sched on SSB and I do it on a Saturday morning, although last week I did it three days in a row as our radio seems to be one of the better ones for boats that are further apart. I do all the radio work on the boat as Dave's hearing is so bad, he cannot hear unless the signal is very clear. Along with our regular morning sched I have been talking to Allan Riches from Brunei Bay Radio at 6.30 each morning since we have been coming across here. Allan runs Brunei Bay Radio and we met him in Darwin and he gave us a lift into the city one day while we were there. He also has a travel business and is organizing the Brunei events for the rally which look really good and are able to do at greatly discounted prices. We have been lucky in Malaysia as all of the tours, dinners etc. are free, being paid for by either the state government or tourist boards. We have also had discounts at all the marinas we have stayed at on the rally. We also need to go into Brunei to update our Malaysian visas as our current one expires in August.

For some reason neither Dave or I have managed to sleep much on this passage and when trying to go to bed and sleep have only managed an hour's sleep a couple of times a day. However last night we finally both managed to get a 3 hour sleep but we will look forward to a good night's sleep tonight.

We will be in Santubong, Kuching for a fortnight as there is a lot to see and do plus from 10-12th July there is the World renowned Rainforest Musical Festival. Not sure how many days we will spend at that though as most of you know that Dave is not really into music!! He thinks one day will be enough for him. Although looking at the web looks like they have some very interesting artists from all over the world - www.rainforestmusic-borneo.com Kuching is a 45 minute bus ride from Santubong which is the nearest anchorage as Kuching is too shallow for yachts to anchor.


Will add the final bit when we get into Santubong before putting it up on our blog.

4.30pm: We dropped anchor here in Santubong at 2.20pm but unfortunately, although we have internet is not fast enough to skype so will probably take wahile to download this on the blog.