Swaggie's wanderings

The early start was moved to a late in the day one, calculating arrival times etc seemed to make this sensible. The weighing anchor again was problematic, taking some time to get fully raised and stowed with jamming in the hawse pipe the issue. The chain was twisted and jumping off the gypsy causing [...]

Island Time

Koh Samui is a bigger island than I expected, not that I am sure what I expected, just that the expectation was smaller as far as islands go. We had anchored at the first spot that afforded some shelter and a chance for rest, but it meant that we would be on the ‘wrong’ side of the island for the [...]

Gulf Wars

Now I know there were two Bushes that had done this before us, but they had the benefit of doing it from a nice comfortable, stable office. In one case having nothing more taxing to decide than how many is a Brazilian and whether a nucular device was called for, or in fact would work, if pronounced and [...]

03 October 2013 | Redang to Samui

Paradise Left and Lost

Raising the anchor proved to be a problem, we had been in such calm water that it had not thrown itself 'flat' in the well, so piled up and jammed in about every place possible on the way back in. Rob and I provided an immense amount of amusement to the fishermen as we tried to correct this. Eventually [...]

02 October 2013 | Redang

Handy Andys

The genset started leaking water into the boat, tracked down to an end plate on the heat exchanger that had cracked. We jury-rigged another plate out of some spare stainless I had lying around and used a new gasket that was in the spares kit. It worked, so the drinks could be kept cold again! It seemed [...]

01 October 2013 | Redang

Illegal Eagles

Now, I realise those keen enough to follow these ramblings closely (and perhaps you need to get out more, if that is truly the case) would note that we had checked out of More Lazier and were now going to stop at another part of the country, technically not permitted, in fact legally not permitted. Given [...]

Paul Anchor, not the singer……

14 September 2013 | Sirutu

Paul

If you learn from your mistakes, then I should be due a PhD……. I decided that I should check the anchor before attempting the retrieval. My effort at making retrieval easy had gone very, very pear shaped. In theory it might have been fine to run a line to the top of the anchor and then use that to free the thing if it was snagged, but in practice (at least in this situation, in coral) it caused more problems that it solved. Dropping the tender, I rowed over to the anchor buoy and using the viewing tube discovered that the rope had snarled and caught on just about every protrusion that there was within a 50 metre radius of the anchor. In fact it would have prevented me getting the anchor up it was so well arranged! I thought about, and tried, a rather feeble attempt at using the gaff, weighted, to lift the line free, but discovered I was short one arm and half a brain early on in the attempt. Back to the boat again and break out the dive gear, was the only solution. That of course resolved things and I shortened the line and reflected on how not to do this in future. Ironically the anchor was just tip buried in a little outcrop of soft rock and would have (and did at 2am) come up with no problem. Now I have salty dive gear with no fresh water spare to wash it. Like most things, it can wait.

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