Bye bye Kudat, and thanks for all the fish

I did like the market there, good fish, so cheap, and very tasty, sadly some stalls sold ray fish and sharks, which are protected here.

Anyway a few days ago I found my lost SIM card, this was the one with my UK number, and is used by various businesses I use the send me 2FA auth responses, you know, when they send you a code by txt/sms when logging in, so because I lost my main phone, I’m having to change SIMs on the backup phone a lot, this came to a halt with the phone refusing to accept any SIM, and the consequent loss of all communications, and internet access for me. I did plan to see if I could get my newer, soggy, iPhone repaired when I hit a main town, but I need weather forecasts, if nothing else before I get there, so off to town to look for a cheap phone to stand in. I settled on an Android RedMi Note 5, this cost about £90, and is pretty cool, it’s also a dual SIM device so I can have a Malay and Philippine SIM card in it. So far it’s been great. The old iPhone started seeing SIM cards again after a full reset, so things are good. Did I mention I also bought an iPad for the navigation, that’s great for pictures too. The RedMi has a high spec camera but the pictures don’t seem as good under low light, or if there’s movement. We shall see. A word of warning, should you chose to make your phone into an authenticator, using something like google or microsoft authenticator apps, should your phone pack in, or drown, then it’s no easy matter to get a new authenticator to take over, and in the case of some of my accounts, I am locked out now, until I have been through the verification process. Quite a pain, I thought the authenticator apps might make things simpler.

One thing I have to respect the Android developers for, is a fantastic bit of marketing, it’s the beautifier option, especially useful on selfies. I mean, who isn’t going to turn it on when doing a selfie, which is what 99.99% of all pictures I see being taken here are. I love the fact that it’s just going to be a few lines of software as well. I gave it a try and it seemed to work, see below:

Before

After

Not bad eh!

So I headed on downtown to checkout, and found there is no need for immigration between Labuan and Sabah, something I had been told was needed, between the states, Labuan is a state, but used to be part of Sabah. I caused a bit of concern with the staff by turning up and requesting a stamp, it seemed, so I made a quick retreat. I wonder if they feel the same way in Labuan, we will see in a few days time.

Tuesday morning 8AM was set for launch, but the NE monsoon perked up, and started blowing very hard and consistent from Sunday night,  On Tuesday morning the sea state was quite rough and the wind was still blowing strong, the yard didn’t want to launch me so I thought best to wait a couple of days and launch Thursday 8AM.

The travel lift arrived bang on time at 8AM, and I was in the water 20 minutes later, doing the old reversing the wrong way trick. still I missed all the hard concrete piles and got out just fine. I would have had a lot  more trouble without the bow thruster.

Before launch, I waited for the boat to be lifted off its supports so I could paint those areas that had been inaccessible, they had removed the ladder and to get me back on board for the launch, a fork lift truck arrived and I stood on the forks and was raised some 15ft up to the boat, that was fun.

Below you can see the strops being passed underneath the hull, they are joined together by pushing steel rods through the hoops at the end. Human ingenuity never ceases to delight me.

As I left the little basin and headed out into the South China Sea, I was confronted with big waves, the remnants of the previous few days high winds, I had about 15 knots of wind blowing onto me, but 10 ft high waves coming at me too. I was only able to make about 2 – 4 knots in these conditions, and I had 15 miles ahead, before I could turn and head south, putting all of this behind me.

It took a good three hours, and at the top of the Kudat peninsula I was rounding, the sea was quite rough and breaking in quite a scary way on the two reefs I had planned to motor in-between, I could hear the voice of uncle Arthur from Dads Army saying “Do you think that’s wise sir?”  Anyway, I pushed on, and once round the top, I unfurled the Yankee headsail, turned of the engine and had a great 6-7 knot rush down the coast to my first nights anchorage at Agul Bay.
The problem here is that the NW coast is exposed to weather, wind and waves, coming in from the NW, and although the monsoon is primarily bringing winds from the NE at this time of year, the big swell and waves generally come from the NW, so you either hide behind an island, of which there are few, or you have to find a crag/inlet in the coast you can get behind. most of the spots on this stretch of coast still are affected by the NW swell, so Agul bay as lovely as it was, was still quite rolly.

Once I  had dropped anchor and got settled, I heard some excited voices approaching, it turned out a local fisherman and his son had canoed out to see me and say hello, we had a little chat, they were ever so nice. Then he rowed back ashore.

I was up at 6:00 the next morning and after a quick coffee, the anchor was up and we were away. It’s a good 8 hours to the next stop at Sambalong.

On route to Sambalong I was able to get the mainsail and headsail up, we were reaching along nicely in the morning breeze, which was now more westerly, WNW making it a reach, in sailing terms, this is quite a fast point of sail, and we were bombing along for a while. I decided to setup the wind steering and get more familiar with it. I made a little vid to show how it works.

By about 11 AM the wind had dropped right off as expected, and I had to motor  sail the rest of the way, at one point I could see a trawler was crossing my path, he was travelling across my bow from starboard to port, showing me his red light (meaning he had right of way, also trawlers trump sailing boats regardless). It looked as if he would be way past me by the time I got close, but as I closed on him, he had slowed down, and we were now on a collision course, we were still a mile apart, so I increased my speed a lot to pass his bow, but it seems he sped up too, because the gains I made were lost and we were back on a collision course. This has happened before, so this time I just carried on until I was quite close to him, and could see that he did intend to carry on regardless and run me over, then I killed my speed, let him pass in front, turned to starboard and followed his wake along until I was sure I was past his trawl then resumed my journey. Just after the encounter, he turned to port, which confirmed my suspicions that he was heading for me. My track is the wiggly line below

I mention this because I would love to know what was going on. I have two theories, based on the fact all the fishermen I have met have been friendly decent folks, I don’t think he’s trying to kill me! Theory 1 is that they have been at sea for a good while and seen nothing but sea and sky, and get so bored that when they see a fancy American yacht, something pretty rare out here, they make a bee line, to break the boredom and out of genuine curiosity. Theory 2 is that they have had a bad time fishing, no catches and the most obvious reason is they have an evil demon onboard.  I have heard this is quite a common belief, now the best way to get rid of the demon, apparently, is to steer very close to another ship and turn away at the last moment, just as the demon jumps from your ship to the other. If this is the case, I must have a shed load of demons somewhere on board. Maybe I didn’t fall off the boat but was pushed in Kudat!

So after this encounter it was just a few more hours to Sambalong where I anchored just behind a bit of headland that was sticking out protecting me from the strong NW swell that was out there, however as I type this it appears the swell has moved around to the west and the rolling is on the rise, the boat is getting quite noisy now, if I wasn’t so tired, I might not sleep in all this rock and roll. I may go to KK tomorrow and check into Sutera harbour, just so I can get a good night’s sleep. Below the sunsetAt this point I lose my internet connection, so I’m finishing this off from Sutera harbour.
Saturday morning, 7am, and I’m up, I had a quite broken nights sleep, the boat kept swinging to be beam onto the sea, that means the waves hit the side of the boat causing it to roll a lot, and kick me out of my bunk.

The north side of the bay looked lovely in the morning sunrise light Now below you can see my course to leave the bay, The Khaki is the land, and the green is underwater mud/sand which is less than 0.5 mtrs deep. I left the anchorage on the bottom right and set the autohelm to slowly take me out, using my eye to work out the course, as you can see it wasnt a good idea, I was going very slow, about 1 knot, so I could secure the anchor to the boat, while doing this I looked over the side to see the bottom of the sea was quite close, it looked to be about 2-3 foot, but it’s usually deeper, is that parallax, or some other effect, either way we were going to go aground for sure, and before I had time to react the boat made a small gravelly sound and stopped. Bugger, not again, a quick sprint to the wheel, a blast in reverse and we motored back without any effort, yet the wheel wouldn’t turn, it seemed jammed, I’m thinking has the grounding damaged it, could the rudder be in mud still somehow, what to do. Then I remembered, the computer was steering, so quickly turning the autopilot off, and we were away. You really wouldn’t know there was a shallow there without the navionics chart, which is nearly always wrong on these matters anyway. My Cmap chart has the water as being 8 mtrs deep there. Attention to detail is required, or even just attention would help!

So onto the 6 hour trip back to Sutera harbour so I can get a good night’s sleep, and buy some lettuce and sugar free bread. Very hot, no wind and a still rolly sea. A totally uneventful trip, but good 4g data all the way allowed me to catch up on emails and make some decent scrabble moves.  Arrival at Sutera harbour was a doddle, I didn’t hit anything or fall off the boat/pontoon. Perhaps I’m getting better slowly.

Finally, I try to keep the blog just about boating, but I had to put this picture on, if you haven’t seen the video of these two rockets landing you must, I was so excited, it was the most awesome thing I have seen in a very long time, this was human endeavor and science working together brilliantly. Well done everyone at spaceX, not that I expect you are reading my blog, and if you are, get back to work, you still screwed up on the third rocket return.
Paul Collister

Well I’m almost ready to go back in the water, the hull is antifouled, the anodes inspected and changed as needed, and the prop cleaned and greased.The faulty seacock and one way valve is working fine now, and I’m just going to do a few cosmetic jobs, like patching some scrapes along the waterline / boot top, then have a relaxing weekend before launching on Tuesday. I decided not to replace the hull zincs, although they look worn down, there’s still a substantial amount of zinc there, and given the rate of decay, they should be good for another year. One of my jobs is to redo the earthing wires inside the boat, several have broken off the seacocks so, this might increase the anode decay.

Oh almost forgot, the solar panels are installed and doing a fine job. 

A few mornings ago, I went into the cockpit to get some bananas, I have them hanging there, only to find they had been eaten, and the visitor had left me a load of rat shit as a calling card. How it got up the ladder is beyond me, but I’m not mad on the whole idea, I keep the hatches shut at night now.
I’ve had time to get to know Kudat a little now, the boatyard is at one end of a man made lagoon, most of which is surrounded by a golf course, that has its clubhouse / hotel resort on the front.  There’s a lovely little marina at the other end from the yard, and you can tie up to mooring bouys here for free. It’s very laid back, the marina has a nice little cafe, and a few berths, but it’s a low key affair.

Downtown is also sleepy and pretty laid back. The market below is very busy every time I have been down there, but no lettuce or plumb tomatoes, so my salads will have to wait a bit. The fish market is great. Mostly the town is home to a fleet of fishing boats, many of them squid boats. I had one of the crew help me choose the best lure for catching Squid today. I have restocked on lures, lines, wires, hooks etc. I fully expect to have a full freezer of fish by the time I arrive in Labuan in a weeks time.

Work continues in the yard, with a constant procession of fishing boats arriving and also launched. I have been told that many boats will haul out in 2 weeks time for the Chinese new year and stay ashore over the period, which is about two weeks long. I hope to see some of the festivities in Labuan.Of course, the boat has been quite a tip the last week, but all the jobs are done now, so I can start tidying up. I gave my three old solar panels away to some French cruisers who are in the yard here. So I built a mockup of the frame for the solar panels to sit on first, I found a double glazing shop that sold me a stack of aluminium extrusion, box shape, which I used. I had planned to have it welded together, but the hardware store next door had a good supply of stainless steel bolts at a very very reasonable price, so I bolted it all together, with the thought of maybe welding it later. I have since decided that bolts are better, and will have more give than a weld as the frame comes under stress.With a little help from Brent, a Brit on the catamaran behind me, I got the new panels mounted and bolted down. I can’t find  supply of jointing compound anywhere. I hope they have some in America 😉

I’m very happy with the physical install, there’s not a lot more weight than the three old panels and canopy, plus the windage area is much the same, so I’m hopeful it won’t blow away in the first gale. As for performance, look at the readings below. The panels are pumping 35A into the boat, I had to put every 12V device on, lights, deck lights, radar, fans fridge etc to get this up, as the batteries wouldn’t take more than 20-25A. I expect I could get 40A if needed, but at the moment, I have had the mains charger turned off for a few days, and I find the batteries are fully recharged from the evening/nights drain by about 10AM. At 07:30, not long after sunrise, with the sun low in the sky, they are providing 10A. I expect that in the northern latitudes, they will perform less well, but will be more than enough. I’m keen to find out.

 

For Kathy, some yard pups, hope that doesn’t get me into trouble with the metoo gang 😉

I had booked the 8 AM slot for launch on Monday, but later realised that I had to go to three offices to checkout, harbour master, immigration and customs.  I have to get my passport stamped to leave Sabah to travel to Labuan, both Malaysia, but different states. I don’t think people back home fully appreciate the benefits of freedom of movement.
Consequently, I have put the launch back to Tuesday, that gives me more time to get fresh food on Monday. I need to be in Labuan before the 27th Feb, so I have plenty of time to meander down there, it’s only 160 Nautical Miles.

Paul Collister

 

 

I do like ship/boatyards, it’s the real business end of the industry, in this yard you have everything from abandoned wrecks, through to fancy modern boats and shipbuilding in wood, steel and GRP. They have a great machine shop / workshop which is actually outdoors, but covered. In the workshop they have a machine for making propellers, big ones at that! Huge lathes for turning propellor shafts and a large milling machine, I’m not sure what you make with them, our metalwork teacher at school, wouldn’t let us near the milling machine, I’m not really sure why we had one.
The other aspect of boatyards I love, are the people who inhabit them, the staff are usually incredibly resourceful, and there aren’t many problems they can’t come up with a solution for, often in a very creative way. The cruisers who live aboard, are usually great dreamers, they are often doing up old wrecks with plans to sail them across the oceans.
In this yard I met a group of French sailors, one couple on their 40ft yacht, they had sailed across the pacific, where flying out to Tahiti tomorrow to view a 54 foot ‘project’ boat, they have been in the yard here for many months already getting their current boat ready for sale, and they will spend many months, if not years getting the next one ready, another Frenchman had sailed his 40 ft concrete boat from France 2/3rds of the way around the world to here. behind me a Brit is having loads of work done on his big cat, and next to him, a sturdy looking long keel boat has obviously had a bad encounter with rocks as a large chunk of keel is missing and the rudder is smashed up badly, I expect there’s an interesting, if not scary story there.
We have the usual pack of stray dogs that hang out here, perhaps a dozen or so, they make a hell of a racket if you disturb them at night, I expect that’s why the yard owner must send enough scraps there way to keep them here as cheap guard dogs, the reality however, is that they are very timid, and run away from you if you get close. I have made friends with two of them, and they are quite good fun, but NO Kathy, we are not getting a dog, at least not yet.
So I have just dumped the pictures I took today from around the yard, as the light was failing, below.

My boat cleaned and ready for some paint

The travel lift and some of the dogs The view down the ladder, it’s a long way and I must remember not to trust the guard rails

The five white dots are blisters I had to sand down, fill and prime, not bad after two years in the tropics, none were more than an inch in diameter

 

The yacht that lost out to the solid immovable object(s) exposed iron ballast The Machine shop The Prop Making machine. I have to see how this works

Some props they made earlier

New boats being built in wooden moulds, pretty large ships really The drums below hold the resin they use

I have been on a ferry like this one, it’s hard to imagine this will ever run again Other boats resting here

General yard shots The workers canteen

Paul Collister

Alternate titles are:

“What a plonker”
“For the sake of a split pin, an iPhone was lost”
“How not to make an entrance”

Everything is fine, the only casualty is my iPhone and my dignity. We are in Kudat and the boat is hauled out. There’s a little bit more work on the hull than I expected, but all in all it’s no big deal, and we should launch again in a week or so.
I had a great trip up here, except for this morning, just as I approached the little cut that leads to the boatyard, a heavy downpour started, I was so busy trying to get everything safely stowed out of the rain, that I almost went over the reef that fringes the entrance to the yard /  man made basin. Visibility was so poor that I turned around and went back out to sea, only to remember that there were lots of fishing boats passing this way, towards the town quay, and that  I might get run down if they didn’t see me in time. I pratted round for an hour before heading in and dropping anchor next to the yard, in front of the grand looking golf club.More rain, and eventually after lunch I got through to the yard who agreed to take me out in 15 minutes, which was great as I had originally booked a slot for tomorrow. All was going great, and I made it into the slings of the travel hoist without any effort at all, but I was worried that the rear sling was too far back and might be catching the rudder, I leaned over the wire lifeline in the cockpit to see if I could see it, but couldn’t, I leaned more, and further out when I suddenly find myself doing a somersault over the side of the boat and into the water, left hand immediately goes to left pocket, and sure enough my iPhone is there,  bugger!  looking up I can see the snapped life line dangling, I pull myself up using it, then notice both the lifelines are in the water. I have about ten people from the yard all looking down at me now. I have fallen off pontoons more than once in my life, but I think this is the first time I ever fell off a boat. How embarrassing. I had to swim around to the stern of the boat and climb back on board using the monitor wind steering frame. Then I have to act casual and make out like this is standard operating procedure for Brits arriving at a new port 🙂
Amazingly the iPhone came on when I plugged it into a charger, but only briefly, now it’s dead. I may see if it can be repaired here. Later inspection revealed the top line hadn’t snapped, but the nut that holds it on had worked it’s way loose, there should be a split pin to stop the nut coming off, but obviously that was missing. I had only recently agreed with a neighbouring boatie in KK how bad the lifelines looked, and I had assured him it was high on my priority list. It’s just not easy to get lines made in Malaysia, I’m not even sure if I can get the wire here.

They have an unusual system for propping up the boats, they use leftover blocks of concrete from when this little basin was built. Can’t say I’m 100% happy, but I expect they know what they’re doing.

The anode on the prop has fallen off, which is odd, as it was there yesterday when I dived on the hull in Pulau Kulambok 

The gigantic travel lift

 

Yesterday I arrived at Palau Kulambok quite early and had a swim around the boat, then I took the Kayak to explore the area. There is a sand spit that joins the island to the mainland and I enjoyed a snorkel around that. Some lovely little fish, but no great coral to see.

The fishing boats had all been very friendly shouting out hello and practising their english phrases on me as they passed by.  It’s odd to think this is as far east as I can go in Malaysia and still have insurance, in fact the military wont let me go further without an escort due to the pirates that operate out there.

Now, I had some success, on the fishing front, when I say success, the fish are still winning, but I think the aeroplane is a game changer, so much so that the fish have confiscated two of them from me. Each time they waited until I had to go into the cabin, and then they took the hook, and I expect they must have been mighty fierce fish, maybe killer sharks, for they managed to snap the line, taking the lure and the aeroplane with them. So back to the fishing tackle shop for more aeroplanes and a much stronger line. I also need to rig up a better alarm system for when they do take the bite, I currently use the line wrapped around a winch system, but I didn’t hear it from below.

Paul Collister

Just a quick update…

I arrived at Pulau Mantanani today.It was a bit of a slog, I left at 7am and arrived at 17:00 and spent 30 minutes trying to find a spot to anchor.
On the way I passed Kinabalu Mountain, which looked lovely in the morning mist, I think it’s the tallest mountain in SE Asia. It was quite rough later on during the passage and I couldn’t motor then as the wind and waves were on the nose and slowed me to just 2 knots, so I had to tack back and forth for 4 hours, mostly steering by hand.  It was while the boat was heeling heavily, and was racing along with a double reefed main and just the staysail, that I began to doubt the wind speed indicator, that was showing 10 knots of wind, and in fact, when I thought about it, it hadn’t been above 10 knots for a very long time. I expect it’s faulty and will have to be replaced.You can see on the map below there are two islands, Besar and Kerchil, which means big and small. I went for the small one as it was recommended to anchor south of the lighthouse, however there isn’t a lighthouse here anymore, did they mean the new radar station? You can see on the google map how the two islands sit on a big oval lump of rock,.Closer to the shore, its solid shallow coral. I have a sonar depth sensor which shows me the sea floor surface, and I can usually spot rocky areas, and eventually I found a very flat area, dropped the hook, and went about setting it in, it was looking good until I upped the revs to test it, then it dragged along rock, and quickly came to a stop. It’s dug in now, but is it under a rock, or worse has the chain wrapped around a rock? I quickly dived over the side with my snorkel, but the light had almost gone, and I couldn’t see much, but it did look mostly sandy there with a few rocky bits. We shall see tomorrow at 7am, when I try to leave.

I decided to try my new fishing apparatus on this trip. As you can see I have an assortment of plastic fish, but now the secret weapon is being deployed…
The aeroplane! I have been assured this will do the trick. I have three of them, so no more buying fish for me.

Sadly things didn’t work out too well, the aeroplane kept dive bombing and in 8 hours I didn’t get any bites. Worse than that, the fish seemed to be mocking me, several times they put on a jumping show alongside the boat. There were big tuna, leaping out of the water repeatedly, right next to the boat, sometimes I swear they were imitating the dolphins in dolphin world, they seemed to be doing synchronised jumps just for me! all the time I had two lures trailing behind. I’m beginning to see why the locals might have turned to using dynamite instead of hooks!

 

Paul Collister

On my last day in Kota Kinabalu, I headed off to the Jabatan Laut, (Literally, Department Sea, or harbour master). I cleared out with them and customs. Then back to the Imago mall to get some fresh lettuce, tomatoes and spuds. As I arrived the dancers were kicking off again and I managed to get some lovely footage (no pun intended).

That evening I took some pictures of the sunset from the quay where the hotel guests go to see it.

The night before I visited the beach at Tanjung Aru again.This is the local beach for KK, and it was rammed with Chinese people, everyone of them seemingly fused to their mobile phones, It seemed that they had gone there, not to enjoy the beach, but to look at it, very odd. We used to spend our summers on the beaches at Barcelona, where the locals know how to use a beach, they build bars on them, setup volleyball courts, sit, tan, swim, drink, eat, smoke weed, and just chill. Now I had a few hundred tourists in front of me, marching up and down the beach, photographing it, photographing themselves and each other, ‘at the beach’. Nobody seemed to realise you can play games, jump in the sea, build sandcastles etc! I wondered if many of them come from inland China and hadn’t seen a beach before. I noticed new arrivals here at the resort often get quite excited when they see the fish swimming in the marina!

So after an evening of packing things away, and a good nights sleep it was time to fill up with fuel and checkout of this resort. No more luxury for me until we reach the Philippines I expect.

The boat has so much prop walk, especially going astern, I have learnt to take advantage of this when manoeuvring in tight spaces. Basically what this means is that if I rev up the engine, either ahead or astern, the back of the boat kicks to the left, I can make the bow move left easily with the bow thruster, so I can almost walk the boat sideways just by bursts of ahead and astern, with the odd touch of bow thruster. This came in handy this morning as there were many boats around the fuel dock, and I had to fit into  a tight gap.Not so good if the dock is on the starboard side. As soon as I fuelled up I left for the short 3 hour journey to my current location, in a little sandy cove just NE of the main port of KK

Leaving the resort meant motoring through all the day tripper boats that speed between the Marina, town and the cluster of islands out here.The islands look lovely, but crowded with fast day-tripper boats razzing around everywhere.

A little later I came across the para-boaty-thing boats, lots of them, all motoring into the wind for lift off and landing, which meant they all just crossed my path.One cut right across my bow, and I wondered what might happen should he misjudge things and the poor lass in the parachute found her line wrapped around my mast. I don’t think we covered that on the RYA Yacht Master course.

Once past the main island Pulua Gaya, I turned into the wind, got the mainsail up, a little startled by the dead cockroach that seemed to jump out of the mainsail at me, then turned off (away from ) the wind and sailed close hauled to my destination.

So I was able to sail for the last 90 minutes at around 6 knots, which was nice.

Early start tomorrow as I was reminded that everywhere will be shutting down in a few weeks for the New Year, and I need to get into the boatyard pronto if this work is going to get done.

Paul Collister

 

I had a long cycle around the back end of town yesterday, it’s easier to throw myself across large 5 lane highway intersections without having to include the timings for Kathy’s safe transit, i.e. it’s only me that will get run over this way.My conclusion so far is that KK needs to get some better planners involved quickly, large chunks of the city are marooned by concrete constructions on islands that are only accessible by road, pedestrians are constantly trekking down central reservations and walking across motorway like roads to just get home.

Above you can see what was once a river has been concreted up, but the fishing village that existed, probably on stilts once, is now marooned inside a built up area.This river has been gentrified, in as much as there’s a cycle path, footpath and seating along its length, and elsewhere, say in Singapore, this would be thriving with visitors. However here,the paving is breaking up, it’s deserted and windswept, not very inviting.

Elsewhere in town, the architecture follows a very basic block style showing very little imagination.

I think this type of block of shops with accommodation above takes its design from the old shop houses, where a trader lived above his shop, and is very common here. It’s been interesting to see the older shops on stilts in the Anambas island, which where very basic, and to see how the have evolved into the modern stores here. It’s a bit like time travel but without all that annoying regeneration the doctor has to put up with.

The new shopping malls, like the one below, that towers over some weird Athenian like ruin has more imagination, but really they should pull the lot down and start again. Still eating seems to be the main activity here, and this restaurant says it all.

 

Electrical News
So the solar panel has been producing power and I am delighted with its performance. Yesterday I grabbed this screen shot of the charger and you can see that the one panel is producing 20A into the batteries. I left the batteries to discharge all night, in fact I’m leaving the mains charger off for a few days as it’s no longer needed.

This is just the one panel, so 40AH, for a few hours, minimum, on a sunny day is easily achievable. Today and yesterday we have completed the bulk charging phase by midday, and the absorption a few hours later.  It’s not even been that sunny, today has been quite overcast, but I was still getting 10A.
Of course we are near the equator, but I am quite confident that the panels should meet our power needs, even in the north pacific, where the wind will also help via the wind generator.

MP3 Player
A while back I was pondering on a music system for the boat, something that was low power, high quality, could play our library but also do most audio needs for the boat, well as a stop gap measure I bought a cheap Bluetooth Radio head from ebay for about £10, this came with a remote control and has worked like a dream. The quality is more than enough, the streaming works extremely well, so we can play music from our iPhones, Macbook, watch TV on the computer with lovely sound from the boats speakers. It also is a decent radio, but sadly Kathy doesn’t care much for local FM radio. Best of all it’s fully redundant and capable of surviving a total failure with little disruption to the music, as I bought a second one at christmas as a spare!

I tried to leave KK yesterday, but the Customs man said I had to come back on Monday, So I will check out then, and probably leave Monday afternoon, or early Tuesday.

P.S. The title is a play on words from my past excursions into the music business

 

At last the solar panels turned up at the marina and they are now onboard.

The day started well, I tidied up the install of the cabin heater, then looked at some old pics of the wiring and saw that the heater had a switch assigned to it on the switch panel, which I was now using for the new VHF Radio. Opening up the panel revealed the old wire, which I had disconnected and marked with a label “Heater”. I think it’s quite rare that my future planning has worked out so well before. Anyway, the heater now shares the cutout with the VHF and once connected, the fans on the heat exchanger fired up and blew hot air around, this was before I turned the heater on (it’s hot here you see 😉 ), So then I fired up the heater propper and within 5 minutes hot water was rushing around the system and hot air was streaming out of the heaters. It’s a lot hotter than the ambient air, but hot enough for Canada in September? We will have to wait and see.

Next I ordered the Sat Phone from PredictWind. It’s the Iridium GO system, and for the bargain price of $USD 120 / Month, we get 14k Internet access, eat all you can. Loads of free minutes and free SMS, This will be our prime method for getting weather forecasts when offshore now. I’m hoping this will be delivered to me when I arrive in Labuan in about 3 weeks time.

Finally after an awful lot of messing around, I got an email to say the Solar Panels had been delivered to the Marina. However I couldn’t collect them until security had cleared them, which was odd. After a bit of flapping, I carried them down from the Office to the boat, one at a time with the help of one of the marina staff, he was a great laugh, but gave me a really hard time about having been in Malaysia for two years and only knowing a couple of words in Malay, so while we carried the panels along, he taught me a few more. A lovely guy, looked about 35 years old, but was in fact 45, with 8 kids!

I had hoped to keep the panels below until I fitted them in Kudat next week, however, they were two big to fit through the cockpit hatch, so another location bove deck was needed. After a bit of head scratching, I decided to put them on top of the existing panels and lash them down. However this meant the existing panels wouldn’t work on the trip to Kudat, and I need the power, so I decided to put the top panel facing up and wire it in temporarily. It was now getting late and I was keen to finish the wiring while the sun shone so I could see if they generated any power. At this point a neighbour arrived for a chat, this delayed me, but I was now thinking, they are designed to outperform other panels in low light, so this would test them, the neighbour left and I continued the job, rushing below, only to find 0V from the panel. I knew the connections were good, but on inspection I had wired it up to the wrong cable, so more work, the sun is now just above the horizon.  rushing below I managed to see the panel generate 1W, which is a start, thats about 0.3% of it’s output. Oh well, tomorrow’s another day…

I have turned off the mains battery charger to let the fridge and the fans run the battery down overnight. Then tomorrow I can watch the single panel perform.  However this may just be a way of ensuring it is rainy and overcast all day tomorrow 🙁

Tomorrow I will check out, stock up and prepare to leave.

 

Paul Collister

Yss, Kathy is back in the UK visiting family, and I’m doing messy boat jobs, but more of that later. Before Kathy left we had a few meals out, I particularly liked the big covered Chinese food court / Hawker market we stumbled on. It’s a huge area, with stalls all around the perimeter.

In the middle of all the tables there is a stage. Now often on the stage they have bands and karaoke sessions, but I was delighted to see some traditional dance and yelping being performed.

Later there was some flame throwing / fire eating stuff.

We were invited up on stage, but I didn’t fancy it, you can imagine I had to grab Kathy to stop her jumping up to join in the traditional dance routines they were teaching.
But enough frivolity, let’s get down to the main business of the day, the heater. It seems odd to be working on the heater here, but we will need it later in the year when we close in on Vancouver / Washington, in September or later. We hate being cold, and when your clothes are damp and you have to do a watch in the rain, it’s just plain miserable. also this is my last chance to work on the heating system, where I am able to import replacement parts easily. I can have stuff shipped here Duty Free on export and Duty Free on import, which helps the coffers a bit. I understand this is costly and difficult to do in the Philippines, and I don’t fancy trying it in Japan either.
The heater we have is a diesel Eberspacher from Germany, it heats water which it pumps around radiators. It’s a neat efficient little system, but ours is very old and probably hasn’t worked for many years, possibly ten. So I stripped it down to try and find out why it wouldn’t start. As you can see from the pic’s it was quite a mess, closer inspection, with the assistance of many youtube videos, revealed that the internal air intake fan was seized, also the cabling for one of the temperature sensors has shed it’s insulation and was shorted. Also the exhaust was blocked with decomposing exhaust outlet pipe. The gaskets on the main heater chamber had perished, I was able to replace these with ones I cut out from some gasket material I brought out. 

As it turned out, I was able to clean it up quite well, and re-assembled it and fired it up. It took awhile for the fuel to get there from the tank, but once the pipe was full and fuel flowed, she fired up and ran very nicely. Hot water was soon reaching the two radiators in the main cabin. These have computer fans behind them which push the air out, this doesn’t seem like a lot to me, but I can’t tell, as they don’t work. There’s no power reaching the fans, but this will be trivial, probably just a case of me reconnecting the wires I pulled out 2 years ago as I had no idea what they did or where they went!.

 

This one’s for Kathy, expect it’s much the same in Swindon 😉

We had a last visit to the Imago mall a few days ago, and another dance troupe, almost identical to the one in the food court were performing. It was odd seeing this in a shopping mall, but I did enjoy it.

Today I went hardware shopping and was delighted to find all the various oddball bits I was looking for.
It will be fun playing with these honkers, I’m expecting lots of fog when we leave Japan, so they might come in useful, only £6, and they only have to last 6 months.

 

This is another filter, all part of making the water onboard nice and safe to drink.

Finally when I left Kathy at the airport in KK, I had a wander, and they had a display of lots of pictures of the town and surrounding country, laid out in a before and after style, usually pictures before the concrete, and then after. Without exception, every ‘before’ picture was lovely, old wooden houses, river boats, long houses etc, and all the afters were concrete blocks. I think it was meant to show how much the town has moved on in just a few decades, interesting how this ‘progress’ appears so different to a tourist.
However one picture really caught my attention, it was the town a few years ago, where the reefs are very clear. You can’t see these from the shore, but I often see waves breaking and know something is there, we also saw a fishing vessel aground on one of these the other day. I was thinking of taking the boat through here, but won’t bother now.

Paul Collister

Just a quick update, The windlass is back on the bowsprit, working fine, I can lower the anchor with the motor now as well as by hand, also I wired in a cheap wireless remote which works well. I ended up moving the windlass Solenoid into the chain locker.

Kathy has taken over the watermaker maintenance, and is keeping records of the state of affairs, we were able to run it up here in the marina as the water is so clear here. We are getting about 300 ppm (Parts per million) pure water, which is quite acceptable I’m told. We can also make about 10 litres per hour, which isn’t too bad.

Finally I’m working on our passage north, on the map below you can see our route north from Borneo up past the western side of the Philippines.

Zooming in, you can see our route passes up past the Palawan Islands, we will be checking into  the Philippines, possibly at Puerto Princesa.To the west of the islands you can see lots of lumps in the sea, these are thousands of islands and reefs, many of them, like the Spratly islands have disputed owners, with China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines all laying claim. Early on I thought I could sail across this area as it’s the most direct route to Hong Kong, but I soon realised you would have to be mad to go that way, the charts, where they exist, are often very inaccurate. Also there’s lots of  military activity around the place. Also there’s a load of uncharted reefs and rocks, for hundreds of miles the depth is only a few metres.
However, I was amazed to see a very large yacht had hit a reef known as ‘Mischief Reef’ a few days ago; as Kathy said, “surely the clues in the name”.

More details here
The area to the east of Palawan is where the pirates hang out, and although it’s supposed to be a fantastic place to cruise, we won’t be going there. We got friendly with a cruising couple in Miri who had been sailing the area where the pirates operate, for a few years, and on more than one occasion, they had missed the terrorists by a day or two. Sadly some of their friends they made there didn’t fare too well.

Once we get midway up Palawan, we have left the terrorists homeland and we will be well on our way to Japan.

I have been putting the next big job off for too long now, the heating system. The boat has plumbed in heating, but it probably hasn’t been used for twenty years, so who knows what state it will be in. I have started investigating the system and found out it’s an Eberspacher water heater system, so basically it burns diesel to heat water which it pumps around radiators. I have two radiators, or heat exchanges as they are known, these are small units fitted under the seating, which have fans to blow the hot air out. Much like the fan heaters you get on the local trains (I’m thinking Merseyrail). Fortunately the heater and the heat exchangers aren’t expensive, so if they are faulty, it’s probably easiest to replace them, rather than to think of a new system for the boat. My only worry is what happens when the unit decides not to start, mid ocean, when it’s freezing. I hate being cold. It has a computer inside (ECU), and I expect if it fails to start, there’s sod all I can do about it. On the last boat we had a diesel stove heater, diesel dripped onto a hot metal plate and burnt. It had a chimney, and that was about as complicated as it got, if the diesel dripped, and the chimney wasn’t blocked, it had to work. However, you had to keep everything clean of soot, and that proved to be a major pain, soot and boats don’t mix, especially if your as clumsy as me.

I mentioned I have ordered the solar panels from Panasonic, at a higher price than I can buy them in the UK, which is mad as they are made here in Malaysia, and are being shipped from the factory in Penang. Well just now I got the bill for shipping, £300 !!!!! I have never paid  £300 for shipping anything in my life, I’m still in shock. £300 buys me another fortnight lazing in this resort.

I bought a water filter today to put in line with the hose pipe, so that we are filtering the water before it goes into the tanks. I now feel like I have moved closer to being a real hardened cruiser as we are drinking the local tap water on the boat. We take the tap water through a 100 Micron course filter  on its way to the tanks, then a 20 Micron filter in the galley. While looking around the hardware store I bought the filter in, I wondered why they had so many kettles.

Paul Collister