Author: paulcollister

Sorry about the email notifications, I can’t work out where the problem is, some people aren’t getting notifications of our posts, but it’s a bit random. The problem may well be with the hosting system at bluehost. Anyway, if you notice you are not getting notifications, let me know so I can decide if another change of software is in order.

Now onto the more important business of what happens when you are squeezed between a high pressure weather system and a low pressure system, which is what is happening here right now. Basically, you get big winds. Last night being a prime example, I was kept up for many hours keeping an eye on the boat, at one point a gust, that must have exceeded 60 knots hit us. even though we are protected here in the marina the boat still heeled right over, Kethy thought we might capsize, so strong was the blow. I have never known anything like it. I waited for the gust to subside, and in the screaming wind and pounding rain I went ashore, just in my shorts and recovered our bicycles which were heading along the pontoon, then back to the boat to pull the dinghy back into the centre of the foredeck. Lots of bits of the boat were trying to escape with the wind, but were thankfully secured. We are doubled up on all our mooring lines, which is just as well, as they were very taut. the strong winds blew for over an hour, and today we still have 30+ knot winds. On talking to the others here I was surprised to hear that a finger pontoon broke loose last night downwind from us and headed off to the far side, with a motor boat still attached. There is debris strewn everywhere, trees have fallen, but the worst I heard was the security man, who sits in a little cabin, not much bigger than a portaloo, was lifted up and blown 100ft across the car park, inside his cabin, he suffered cuts and bruises, but hopefully nothing too serious.
One of the other yachties took me around the marina to show me the mooring lines on a big old clunk of a boat moored directly upwind of me. The lines are chafing and if they break we could have 20-30 tons of boat piling into us. We contacted the marina owner and he sent a lad onboard to add some extra lines, but they are cheap and will chafe quickly as well. I’m putting this picture here so you can see, and also so I have some proof in the cloud should the worst happen and we need to make an insurance claim 🙁

The boat to starboard of the hulk is a police boat that came in this morning, I feel sorry for them if they were out in last night’s weather.

I know this doesn’t compare with the weather Ireland has just had, but it does remind you just how strong the forces of nature can be. We also had an earthquake warning for east of Sabah, but only 5.4 and no Tsunami was expected.
If the weather calms, I will fix my puncture and we will go for a bike ride to survey the local damage. Below is yesterdays ride as logged on my phone. Paul Collister

Or so it seems, yesterday we both bought ourselves folding bikes, and today we used them for a little shopping trip downtown. Besides a massive downpour, which made the Borneo Post, it was so severe, and a flat tyre, they are a great success. We didn’t spend too much on the bikes, about £120 each, the good ones started at over £1000 (Brompton, Dahon etc), they are alloy, and might last a year or more, we will see. So far they have been great, and really extend our ‘shopping’ area 🙁 However, soon I will be able to pop off on my own and check out the fixings and fasteners shops, along with the electrical supplies, and even take in some sightseeing down the docks!

Earlier in the week, the weather took a decided turn for the worse, strong winds from the SW monsoon have set in, bringing very wet squally weather. This is the same weather that made it so difficult for us, beating up to Thailand a year ago, and is due to continue for quite a few days now.

One day the kids came into the marina to practice their sailing as the sea was too rough

While replacing the missing blades on our wind turbine, which now works really well, I found an anchor light above the canopy which I must have left out. It’s the white one on the left, but it was the same as the red one next to it two months ago, just shows what two months of UV does to plastic.

We popped over to the spit of land that makes the breakwater for the marina, this is where the seahorse is, it also has a lovely large hall, built by indigenous craftsmen here, possibly from the Iban tribe, using traditional methods, it’s mostly made of bamboo, looking up into the roof reveals a wonderful lattice of bamboo rafters and supports

Inside there was an exhibition of local art, I snapped these pictures, including the lovely representation of the marina, where I nicked the banner above from.

Below is a pic of one of the many rig crew supply ships that calls into the marina, ferrying lots of ‘bob the builders’ between the rigs and land. there are about 10 of these ships and they are in and out every 30 mins or so, so quite busy.

On our trip to get the bike I took a few pics, below shows there is no shortage of plastic flowers here, or just plastic in general.

I think they need to re-instate this meter cupboard at some point. I think it’s gas, which is odd as you don’t normally see much piped gas here, however this is a oil/gas town.

We went shopping in Boulevard, a biggish Malaysian chain today, they had a good display of plastic christmas trees, but it was halloween that caught my eye, I didn’t think it was common here, but the young kids seemed to love it

Another Mannequin display caught my attention in the mall, they don’t look very happy! 

For a long time I was confused when checking out in the big stores by the first question, which back home was usually ‘do you need bags’, but here it sounded more like Havka, or HavMemKa, which I eventually decoded into ‘have Store card? or have Member Card’. I figured it would be difficult to get as an itinerant, however recently we saw great savings on offer for members, so I enquired and for £2 got a store loyalty card, which would have paid for itself if we got it before Kathy bought the £18 bottle of cheap plonk! Not only did I get the card, but a gift was forthcoming of a glass jar with a cat lid, in a cloth outfit. This will be ever so useful 😉 (I wonder how many more they need to move on)

And if I wasn’t excited enough with that, I got a free, tasteful, and subtle ‘bag for life’

The rain has been lovely, keeping the temperatures down, and the breeze very refreshing. Today is also the first day I’m not suffering from bites, it’s hard to avoid here, I think it’s mostly sand flies, in many ways they are worse than mosquitoes as you can’t see them, but they certainly itch all right.
I have managed to get a few jobs done, The wind generator now has all six blades running, and the vibration has stopped now. The watermaker is in bits under the cabin table waiting for me to service the high pressure pump and then re-assemble. The chart table area has been re-organised and the plastic boxes now have lots of items neatly stowed and catalogued out of the way. but by far our favorite achievement has to be getting bikes.

Kathy had to be persuaded to wear her helmet, which eventually she agreed to. (the mess behind Kathy is all hers by the way)

Kathy soon took to the bike, some adjustment to height was later required.

And this little video is of Kathy bombing along, the house behind looks so big, I thought it was a hotel, or apartments, but it’s actually one house, belonging to a Brit, called Bob, who we made friends with last time we were here.

So while the kids here are throwing themselves onto the tarmac from their scooters at 30mph, we tootle along at 7mph, Helmets, front and rear lights and reflectors, locks, pumps and a repair kit; So first world. No wonder we get stares.

Next up is the Watermaker and a rework of the solar panels. In November we are going to sail up to Labuan, which I believe is pronounced in a french sort of ‘La Bwan’ way. Labuan, is duty free so I want to arrange to get stuff shipped there that we need from the UK or America.

Paul Collister

 

This is boring, but I just changed my mailing software over, so that it uses an add-on called MailPoet to notify those of you who get notified , of new posts. It seems to work on the notify side, but not on the subscribing new users side. I’m  working on it.

Nothing much else to report, I didn’t get the bikes, they were very pricey for quite low quality. This one below was £120, secondhand but had a bent frame! Will keep looking.

We found a nice market close by and had a great time trying to work out what Courgette is in Malay, It’s Labu Kecil, but that describes two very different members of the same family, neither which look or taste much like courgette, but it was fun learning.

The car has gone back and now we have enough food for weeks and plenty of jobs to be getting on with. I bought a stack of plastic boxes to re-organise my stowage of electrical stuff in.

Because of the frequent very heavy rain here, when we go out, we always have to seal the boat up, today was scorchio hot, and when we returned, the boat was baking inside, Kathy then ran the oven full on for a long time to roast the fresh veg we had, It’s now 2:30 AM and it’s still too hot for me to sleep. Another downside to paradise!

Paul Collister (hoping this notification goes out)

 

Not a lot to report, I had a go at fixing the SWR meter movement, but failed, I couldn’t tin the wire, I expect it may not have been solderable and should have been crimped on, anyway it’s in the bin now, but thanks to an inspired suggestion from Bob,  I connected my old multimeter up to the SWR meter, and measured the voltages forward and reverse, Mostly I seem to have about 500 dooberies going forward, and about 20 coming back, so that sounds pretty good to me. Enough for me to push on and try to make contact with somebody over the high frequency wavelengths. I have the Iambic keyer wired up, and have tested I can send morse code, but my old 28 words/minute seem to be more like 2.8wpm now, my reactions on the paddles seem a lot slower.

We hired a car for two days and it was delivered to the marina by William who runs the car hire company here, He explained that I had to bring the car back 12 hours early, which I explained was a pain, given what I had planned. However he was only going to charge me one and a half days rate, so I should be happy that I was getting a two day hire for 1.5 days cost. I struggled with his logic, but decided it would be fine anyway, so off we went. William recommended a great supermarket near the airport for cheap goods, with a range of western foods and a good selection of wine. When we got there we drove to the main car park on the roof and found we were the only car there, on entering the mall and heading down the stairs it was somewhat disconcerting to find 99% of the stores shuttered up, and the only people around were cleaners, who looked at us oddly. I have been in Malaysia long enough now for this not to phase me. when we reached the ground floor, we found a big supermarket, with a great range of food, just as William had predicted. However we were the only customers in the shop. Very odd for 11AM. I whipped out my phone to check it wasn’t ‘Malaysian National Boycott the mall day’, but no. Just an ordinary day. So we filled our boots and headed off to the next mall ( 2 of 4, it turned out).
The next mall was Giant, a Asda/Costco like brand here, and I bought a new fan for the boat, I loved the description on the side so much I felt I had to share it. I don’t think you can even blame google translate for this one, I’m just amazed that a major high street supermarket chain, sells products so badly packaged! For most things electrical you buy here, there is usually a testing station in the supermarket where a man will unpack your fan, fridge, light bulb, tv etc and plug it in and test it. The reason being, there is quite a high failure rate, and they wont accept returns. I forgot to get the fan tested, but it worked anyway. I’m looking forward to a luxurious smooth quiet sleep tonight.
Another great label I snapped was this. I have no idea what the product is, but the handshake under a shrimp, sold it for me!

Finally, I snapped this picture of some showroom dummies, They are so striking to come across in the mall, yet I expect local people here think nothing of them, I wonder if the locals were in Liverpool 1, they would feel the same about our silver, or headless mannequins.

Tomorrow we have half a day in the car to go and find some bicycles.

Paul Collister

 

Sort of, apologies if you got a notification of a new post and there wasn’t one, I’m losing my powers with computers, I wanted to put a new page on, but accidently put it on as a post, then deleted it and put it back as a page. It now appears as a link at the top of the page to ‘useful SE Asia links’, it’s there to help me find pages I use a lot quickly, or ones I forget I have, but are useful. That’s mostly the weather pages. The synoptic charts are what I will be using a lot for my passage planning.
There’s not a lot to report since we got here, we have both struggled with the jetlag and the heat more than we expected, but it’s been cooler today with a strong wind cooling us down, we also seem to be getting tired in the evening which bodes well.
I forgot to mention that I wired the new VHF Radio into the switchboard panel here, and 10 minutes after I had closed up the panel there was quite a loud bang, it had a very familiar Phut sound, which I recognised right away as the sound you get when you short out the mains supply. Those of you who have done this will know what I mean, usually theres a strong smell and a little puff of smoke rising from the short. However when I opened the panel, I could smell the burning, but I couldnt see anything wrong. After a lot of looking, and checking I had to give up, everything seemed fine, I popped outside to reset the circuit breaker on the pontoon and everything was working again, except for the little light that comes on to show mains is present. I took this out, assuming it had failed, and on closer inspection it was toast, so now Im even more confused, I don’t believe in coincidences, and I know this will come back to haunt me, however the only time it will be a problem is when we are plugged into the shore, so no big deal really.
Last night we walked over to the Sea Horse bit of the breakwater, they had set up a stage, lots of food and drink were being served and lots of joggers were arriving. It turned out at 19:30, when it was dark, there would be a charity run. I was expecting a rock concert as for the previous two days there had been a PA company setting up a huge rig, doing lots of testing, and playing lots of music to check the sound quality. I must say they did a great job. I did that for a living once, and I know how hard it can be. As it turned out, the run lasted for about 2 hours, then they turned the PA off and took it all down! Still it was nice to see hundreds out running to raise money for local good causes.
Today Kathy baked bread, we have a new supply of flour, and Kathy had a new recipe she used back in Liverpool to great affect.

The bread looked great ging into the oven, but came out looking as white as when it went in. However it tasted great, far better than anything we have been able to buy in Sarawak so far

You can see below Kathy has an umbrella type device for keeping the flies off the dough, it works really well, especially as we have a lot of flies right now. However it does make me wonder if I have slipped back in time to some 60s tea room in the country, or maybe I have gone forward in time and I’m in a nursing home of dubious quality! I hate frilly lace / net curtains

While the bread cooled we went for a walk, I had read there was a bike shop not far away, and although I doubted it, we needed some exercise so off we went. We stopped for a drink in a very british style modern bar, however they let the side down a little by selling various Irish brews 😉 .

On the way back to the boat about 10 motorbikes passed us in the opposite direction, nothing unusual, except that just as they passed us there was an awful sound of metal scraping on tarmac, followed by a crash, I watch one bike with the rider under it screech along the road, into another bike, whose passenger flew off, the guy under the bike parted from it and his bike continued along the road. I ran back to see what I could do to help, fully expecting the worst, however within a few seconds the riders where up, the other bikes had turned around and come back to help. The riders recovered their bikes and got them to the side of the road while their friends collected broken bits of mudguards and things. I saw both the riders walking, and wondered just how they weren’t more injured. I expect they will have had very serious grazing and maybe worse. Road safety is appaling here compared with back home. This isnt the first crash I have seen, but the first to happen right next to me. The local internet gossip/news bulletin board reports a road death every few days, just in this town.

On a lighter note, this is what Kathy presented to me for dinner last night!

It’s the remains of a tin of tuna! to be fair there was salad and stuff out.

One of the big jobs I have to do is sort out all the long range communications, one of which is the HF SSB Radio. I suggest if your name is not Peter or Neil, you might want to switch off now as this bit is beyond geeky.
I thought it time to connect up the SWR meter and see how well the ATU Tuner is working with the backstay antenna. This meter came with the boat and looks like it might have taken a swim at some point, but as long as it works, I dont care about looks. First problem was that the path through the meter was O/C. Not a good start, but easy to debug, after all it’s just a rod of metal from one SO239 to another, and sure enough the connection was broken. Next, it didn’t register anything at all, further investigation found a flaky switch and some dry joints. Still it acted like it was dead. I wondered if the Transmitter on the SSB was actually transmitting, I haven’t had any communication with it so far, so I dug out my old roberts SW radio and set it up on a marine frequency, put the transmitter to AM, and with Kathy on the mike, I went for a walk to the other side of the Marina. Kathy was coming through loud and clear.
Back to the Meter, and a test of the actual meter display movement  showed it to be open circuit. Now that’s something I wouldn’t try to fix as it’s kind of in the Swiss watch maker department. So that was it, a bin job.

However, I thought, nothing to lose, and I will be well chuffed if I fix this one. So tomorrow, should I find myself with a steady hand and clear eyesight, I’m going to try and solder back the hairspring wire that has become detached from the movement. I’d be happy to bin it and buy another if that was an option, but I doubt if they are available anywhere on Borneo, I could be wrong.

Paul Collister

 

Well we are back installed on Sister Midnight in Miri Sarawak, Borneo.
The flight here from the UK was painless enough, although the 90 minute queue for immigration at Kuala Lumpur had me worrying we might miss our connection to Miri, but it all worked out well. The taxi ride from the airport to the boat reminded me of how nice it is to be back, the driver wanted to know everything about our plans. Taxi drivers here, in fact, most people, are very interested in foreigners and love to chat. Also I’m used to being a bit tense when arriving in a country at the thought of being ripped off at the airport for the last leg of the trip, however I’m always very surprised at the low cost of the taxis here.

We arrived back at the boat very late, and so I couldnt see much of the outside of the boat, but it all looked good, the varnish felt good, I had worried it might have flaked in the heat, first we had to find the key. It was hidden in a secret place, which we had forgotten, I had written down the place, as I knew we would forget, but I forgot where I wrote it down. Should I really be crossing an ocean with such strained mental powers!

Having eventually located the key, we made tentative steps into the boat, no sign of water, lights on, battery looks good, no dead creatures, and on closer inspection I couldnt see anything different from when we left, a great relief. If you think I’m making a big deal of this, you might not know I once returned to our last boat, Lady Stardust, in Barcelona to find the inside looking like a bomb had gone off, everything was covered in shredded paper, fabric, other material, and mouse shit everywhere. along with dead mice. After 24 hours of cleaning, I spotted a live mouse behind the fridge and knew it would all happen again if I didnt catch it. On another occasion, as I stepped down the companionway steps into the boat I ended up stepping into 6″ of water that was covering the cabin sole (floor). So to find the boat pristine was a blessing.

So to start the blog off in style, let’s have a picture of the head (toilet)

Now you might just spot a tadpole like little fish there. For those of you not familiar with boat toilets, they work by sucking in water from the sea and flushing it back out, or to a holding tank when in harbour. It’s not unusual to get a fish sucked in. Now just to digress a moment, I think this phenomenon might shed some light on alien abductions, stay with me..
So this little fish, lets call him Freddy, is swimming along, when suddenly there’s a swirling vortex, and  he is moved from his familiar world into a shiny white porcelain bowl. Looking up he can see creatures with huge heads staring at him, The heads change as different people come to examine him. After a while, he is returned, via a swirling vortex of rushing water back to his familiar world. When Freddy finds his friends and family, and explains the preceding events, nobody believes him! Ring any bells?
Anyway, the problem here was that little Freddy was a really good swimmer, and found a little spot in the plumbing that the swirling vortex didn’t reach, so after an extended flush, he popped back into the bowl. This went on for 24 hours and many flushes, we started to worry for poor Freddy, he was now hiding whenever we peered into the bowl, later he weakened, we couldn’t rescue him (thinking about it, he could be a she), I thought about feeding it, Kathy was on the verge of giving it a name, however today it was too weak to hide from the flush, and was swept out to the sea, hopefully if will find food and thrive, but I expect it’s not got a great future. It’s a fish eat fish world out there.

So yesterday I unpacked and  started making use of the many spares I had brought out. I connected a new VHF radio up, it’s actually a fancy, but broken one from Stardust, but the only broken bit is the DSC GPS NMEA input feed, this is only a problem if we send out an automatic Distress alert, it won’t have our position, however the existing radio is not great and has no DSC function anyway. The galley light had broken, which I fixed by replacing the on/off switch, can’t imagine why that failed.

We headed off into town, walking along the beach walk, taking in a beautiful sunset, then did a big shop, had dinner at Madli’s which does nice veggie food for Kathy. We got a taxi back, then I stayed up till 4 am unable to sleep, but made up for it today by sleeping till 16:00 followed by breakfast. Hope I can get back to a normal sleep routine tonight.

I noticed that they have put up a big ‘Watch out for Crocodiles’ sign in the Marina, looking into it, there have been some 60 croc attacks here in Sarawak over the last 5 years, and that most beaches here are no longer considered safe. The problem seems to have grown over the decades since the UN put a ban on croc hunting around the world, not helped by the expansion of human habitation into forested areas. However Malaysia has recently been given the right to cull the crocs since their numbers have risen sharply and the incidents of attack have escalated. However, the government have failed to issue hunting licenses yet, so the problem is very real.

We are hoping to get some bicycles next week, I need to get fit over the next few months before we sail the north pacific.

Paul Collister

We are heading back, in two hours time, my brother Simon will take us to Manchester where we start our long flight back to Sister Midnight.

Kathy has seen fit to update the blog with the entries from some distant past, but now she is up to date and can start blogging in earnest.

We have spent the last few hours juggling bags around trying to get the contents down to 23kg, but it’s a struggle, I basically have a full ocean going yacht in my bag, just disassembled 😉 Hopefully the customs at Kuala Lumpur or Miri won’t care too much, they can charge me tax on new items, but shouldn’t as it’s for export via yacht, but this is not something that happens very often at the airport, so they wont be used to that. We have an hour spare at Heathrow, at two hours spare at KL, but we have to transit to a satellite airport there, so all in all it’s tight.

We should arrive at the boat on Wednesday evening, around 8pm, after the sun has set, and that’s when the fun might start. I have never left a boat for this long (2 months) in the tropics, and I am fearful of what awaits us. I expect some mold to have formed on the surfaces, we might have some water damage as it has rained a lot while we have been away, and boats always leak somewhere, I’m hoping it will only be minor, if at all. Also there is the big worry that something with legs has made a home of our boat, anything from cockroaches to rats are possible, but I’m hoping the measures we took back in July should have stopped this. We will see.

Once back I will update you all with our plans, but the gist of it is that we hang around Borneo until March, then head North to Hong Kong, Japan, then onto the USA, arriving by September, we have our 10 year visas now, so hopefully we should be allowed in ok.

Paul Collister

I have just read an article about a poor family who have lost everything they had when their catamaran went aground on a reef in the south Pacific last week. They have said the Navionics chart didn’t show the reef, and the coastguard agreed. I thought it was common knowledge that electronic charts can vary in accuracy a lot, especially in remote areas not used by bigger ships. We cross reference several charts, including paper ones before deciding on a plan. However that hasn’t stopped us hitting things 😉 . I assumed that the reason our marina was 1 mile out to sea on all our electronic charts here was due to a similar charting error, but when we were sitting in a restaurant, maybe a mile inshore the other night, we were told that just a few years ago, we would have been up to our necks in the waters of the south China Sea. A massive area here, including that of the marina is built on reclaimed land, the charts don’t have that yet, so all is explained. What amazes me, is that the land, which now I look at it, is obviously very flat in every direction, has such a mass of vegetation, trees that look decades old, can only have been here for 5 years or less. Stuff grows fast here.

There’s a lovely development right at the entrance to the marina, effectively it’s the end of a substantial breakwater. There’s a sea horse built at the entrance, one of the symbols of the area, and on approach, I remember asking Kathy to keep an eye out for a large sea horse, that was our guide in. I’m not sure she took me seriously, but see if you can pick it out from the pictures below.

This building is a massive structure made of timber, it looks amazing inside, and I think it was built from local timber using traditional local skills. 

I really like Miri, it’s a mellow town, seems like there’s everything you need here, the people seem very happy and they are very friendly. There’s a good selection of food and drink, a few decent supermarkets, no Waitrose, or even Tesco, but after Tarempa, we have modest needs 😉
The marina folks all seem friendly and helpful, there are quite a few boats whose crew have arrived here and liked it so much they have decided to stay, some have been here many years, others have applied for citizenship in Sarawak, including the couple who took this photograph, for the website, which I have borrowed, I hope they don’t mind.

What’s more bizarre, is that we met an Englishman in town who lives close to the marina, his house backs onto the lake/backwater of the marina, where he keeps his boat, and he informed us of another brit who lives close by, who turns out to be someone we know and have seen down our local sailing club back home many a time, when we used to drink there of a weekend. Small world or what.

I was up at 6:30 this morning to get a coat of varnish on the woodwork, and later I plan to change the coolant in the engine, putting in new antifreeze, not for the freezing bit, but for the protection against rust it gives. Later we will drag the headsails down and stow them away. I figure that the protective layer that saves the sails from the sun, called a UV sacrificial strip, will last 3 months longer out of the sun for 3 months, and this usually fails long before the sails, so if I do this every year for 4 years, I will get another years life out of the sail. but it’s a big pain getting the sails down and up.

Tonight we will head into town in search of some vegan food for Kathy.

Not long until we fly home.

Paul Collister

 

We left Pulau Patok, into a heavy tide and swell which slowed us down to a couple of knots. The forecast was hopeless, possibly a little wind but from the wrong direction, also there wasn’t anywhere obvious to take shelter from the swell on the next 220 miles of coast, other than a commercial harbour, which looked a bit grim. so I decided, perhaps rashly, to go direct to Miri, which is 180 NM as the crow flies, and would take about 36 hours if we could average 5 knots. As it turned out we didn’t, and took 44 hours. Just before we arrived, we got a weather forecast over the NavText that the severe thunderstorms to the north of us would continue until yesterday. I have no idea what the point of such a forecast is, in fact I shouldn’t call it a forecast at all, perhaps a hindsightcast would be more appropriate. However that did explain why we had light winds, but huge swells.
We sailed offshore, which gave us a more direct route, but also kept us away from the inshore fishermen in their small unlit boats. We would have two nights at sea, and it was only when I got the correct charts up on my plotter that I realised just how many oil and gas platforms there are here. I was fortunate that we would reach the first major block of them just as dawn arrived, it was the second night that was going to be a problem. We were low on fuel, so I took every opportunity to sail, even in such light winds. In fact I was really pleased at how well the boat sailed in just 5-10 knots of wind, I used the time to play with the sails and the rig to get the best performance. Slowly it’s all coming together.
There were lots of ships around, and a lot of them not lit correctly. The ones I hate the most are the tugs, sometimes they just have a small flashing light on the tow and the tug itself has a single white light.

Sometimes the tugs have AIS and so you know it’s a tug, other times you can just make out some lights and a shape on the radar. If you get in between the tow, you’re in big trouble, I hate to think what a mess it would make of our boat. The other thing is the tow, in this case above, a huge load of logs, is usually trying to go in a different direction to the tug, and the tug might be pointing in quite a different direction to what it is travelling, very confusing. At one point a fishing boat appeared behind me, this was my fault for not looking astern enough, but he would have been within 50ft, I shone a torch at him, and he turned on all his deck lights, killed the engine, then drifted, before quickly going around my stern and away. I’m not sure who was shocked the most!

I had a lot of notes about this area, and I re-read them again, and also found the admiralty guide had a section on this area, which cautioned against travelling here at night, unless you had a good clear full moon. I was expecting the moon to rise about 3AM, half moon, and hidden behind clouds. The main problem is well heads, underwater structures where oil is or had been extracted. There are a lot of disused well heads which apparently can come close to the surface and are not lit. A catamaran on the Sail Malaysia Rally hit one last year, fortunately no serious damage occurred. After a while I decided that most of the well heads would be within the designated fields, and I should be fine away from them. I was also worried that back home I got chased away from the Douglas Gas platform in the Irish sea as you are not allowed within 3nm of the rig, yet here the rigs were often only 4-5 nm apart, making that difficult. I later found out that 500m is the distance you have to keep away. As it turned out it all went quite smoothly, I dropped the mainsail about 6AM knowing sadly I wont be using that again for a few months. A squall came through just before dawn, and as the skies lightened, we approached Miri, where we planned to anchor at 7AM and contact the Marina for guidance in, and to wait for high water at 08:30. however the swell was so bad I decided I would prefer to motor round for an hour rather than anchor and be kicked around by the waves. Kathy and I had been doing 4 hour on /off watches, but not doing it properly and we were both tired now. Looking at the tide tables, I realised that as we only have one tide a day, the twelfths rule doesn’t apply, this rule is a way of working out how fast the tide comes in, and the upshot was we would have enough water to get in now, also big ships were ploughing into and out of the marina. So after a gap in the big ships, we shot in and grabbed a berth.  It felt odd, I tried the bow thruster before we came in, but it was running for a second, then making a weird noise, I had worried that the fouling from Santubong may have affected it, but on closer inspection, i.e. me hanging over the bow while Kathy powered it up, made me realise that the swell was lifting the bow thruster clear of the water, and it was whizzing around in the air, not good for it. Once in the marina we moored up, it went remarkably well, Kathy jumped ashore with a line, I stopped the boat and passed her the other lines and that was the end of a ten week trip from our last Marina in Johor Baru.
Now we have to get used to having an electric kettle, a toaster that doesn’t burn the toast, and all the water we want from the tap.

That’s us above in Miri, now we have ten days to do a lot of cleaning up and putting away before we come home. but for now we are off to explore the area a little before a long deep sleep.

Paul Collister

I decided last night to take the inland river route to our next destination, rather than going by sea. You can see the route below.Now this kind of sailing boat isn’t really meant to be going down rivers, for one, the rivers are usually very shallow in places restricting the boats movement, and makes sailing quite difficult if not impossible. The boat also has a deep keel, as deep as some quite big ships. But as the forecast was for no wind I thought it might be more interesting than following the coast. I checked the chart a lot, I didn’t like the navigation guidance in the admiralty publication, it stated that details wouldn’t be given as it should not be attempted without a pilot on board. However these guidelines are intended for bigger boats than me, I studied several charts and came to the conclusion that the one shallow bit at 1.5 metres would be ok if we hit it near high water which was 4.5 metres at 10:50 AM, Low water was only 1.5 mtrs so even at low water we should be ok. I also realised the currents in the river would be strong and had to factor that in, however as its neap tides right now, the tides would be at their weakest and so there wouldn’t be a better time to try. So off we went an hour late, and where straight into a 2-3 knot flood current racing us along at 7.5 knots, unfortunately, our little paddle wheel under the hull which tells me the boat speed through water, as apposed to the GPS which gives us boat speed relative to land, was all fouled up from Santubong and didn’t work.
I left Kathy on the helm to pop below and clean the paddle wheel. I really needed to be on top of the currents for this trip. The paddle wheel can be pulled back into the boat through its hole in the hull, this leaves a 2″ diameter hole in the hull a few feet below the waterline, so obviously the sea tries to come in and fill the boat up. My fancy paddle wheel fitting has a flap which closes as the wheel is removed, stopping a huge influx of water, sadly it had fouled up as well, so I got quite a soaking as the water gushed in. I have a plug that goes in, but it takes a few seconds to insert and tighten, eventually the wheel was cleaned, lots of barnacles were present, but it’s all working again.
We were going to turn North halfway along the river and exit by our destination, the island Pulau Patok, the timing meant that the tide should have turned and we would also get the ebb tide as we headed north. We met a few little fishing boats, a few bigger boats and a container ship on route. I wondered if the pilot on board was looking at us and tut tutting, I still didn’t know if the northbound passage was navigable at this point as it’s not a main shipping route, and had some seriously shallow bits on the chart.
Just after this ship passed we went around its stern and north, where we saw a few more boats, including a ferry visiting various jetties tucked into the shoreline. There was plenty of debris in the river.We had to keep a good lookout for these logs, this one reminded us f the ‘Statue of Liberty’, possible planet of the apes style. At our anchorage I can see where some of the tress come from, using my impromptu telephoto lens (binoculars) I took this picture You can see the roots completely exposed at low water, soon these trees will topple over, lets hope not tonight.

What I hadn’t bargained on was the wind picking up from the North, the grib files where hinting at 5 knots, maybe going to 10 overnight, but we found ourselves with 15 knots from the north, fighting a 2 knot current going out. This creates a condition sailors know as wind against tide, with the two fighting each other, this causes the waves to rise up quite steep and close together, this slowed our passage through the water down, but the current pushed us along nicely all the same. My main problem was that our destination is protected from every direction except the north, when we arrived there was little shelter to be had, and I envisaged a rocky night, however the wind just died down, and as I write this it’s a light breeze, the tide is turning now so the sea should calm down a lot. One problem we always have is that as the tide turns, we usually have 30 minutes to an hour where we are side on to the swell and that’s usually makes the boat roll a lot.

For anyone interested, I have put some pictures of our anchorage from Monday, on the charts you can see the route we planned. There are several buoys to guide us into the deeper water path, but half of these were missing, in one case literally half the buoy was missing, just the base in the water was left.

This is what the same place looks like from space

And heres a bing image I used in openCPN that really shows the sandbanks at the entrance to the river And this is what it looks like from the anchorage, looking west back to the tip we hid behind to protect us fro the westerlies

Paul Collister