Author: paulcollister

Arrived safely in Telaga, strong headwind NNW kept us under 4 knts for the 90 minutes that we took to get here. Rigging got here an hour before us and we have been given a berth, but only for 3 days, so must start on the rigging tomorrow.

I’m sure Kathy will put pictures up, but for now here are a few, oh nearly forgot, I tried the autohelm and it didn’t work. It’s not even trying to drive the wheel, hopefully something simple.

Paul C

It’s Sunday afternoon, we had planned to leave at lunchtime, but the fact that the rigging still hasn’t arrived, the marina here is cheaper than Telaga, and that we had some quite fierce squalls blow through earlier, tipping the boat some way at its berth, that we have decided to stay another day. It’s quite wet and overcast so I am doing some route planning for Thailand today.

I spent time yesterday running ropes to the windvane steering, this is a monitor windvane, that will steer us everywhere over the next few years. It works with little effort, uses no fuel or electricity and understands the quirks of the wind at least, if not better, than most humans. Sadly it’s broken. I’m wondering when I will stop finding broken things on this boat. The pendulum arm at the bottom is bent, reading the manual, this is not uncommon as it can easily be bent by reversing into a high pontoon or being hit astern by another boat. It’s only slightly bent, but enough to stop the whole thing working, Everything looks ok, and moves the right way, but the curve on the pendulum means there is too much friction for the windvane part to turn the auxiliary servo rudder. This mechanism has to be almost friction free to work in light winds. I’m waiting to find out if the manufacturer thinks it can be repaired or needs to have the arm replaced.
We loved the Hydrovane on Stardust so much we called her Harriot, because she looked elegant and started with H. The mechanical electrical autopilot was called Simon, as it worked well with its maker ‘Simon Simrad’.
On Sister midnight we pondered on what to name the electrical auto pilot. It’s not very sophisticated, but sturdy and reliable. old fashioned but got a few years left in it, so we went for Captain Mainwaring. when thinking of the companion Monitor windvane, which is more elegant, quite clever we thought perhaps Uncle Arthur. For those reading who are confused, you should watch any episode of Dad’s Army for a better understanding.

I made this video of a 3-4ft thing, lizard? having his morning beach stroll earlier

Paul C

 

 

We did a bit more exploring of the forest here yesterday, keeping mostly to well worn paths, to be fair. We came across another large building,could have been a hotel or a mansion house, but now being taken over by the jungle. I would love to know the history of this place. I’d also like to see the books, how do you make this place make money when everything has to be ferried in and out on little boats?

This island is very alive, it’s teaming with creatures, monkeys come down to rummage through the bins, and the beaches are literally like moving surfaces comprised of sand coloured crabs, snails, and lots of other little creepy things. I made a little video below to make my point!

Soon we are checking out of Malaysia, and I went rummaging through the stacks of boat papers last night to see if I could find our entry papers into Malaysia, which I did. I’m hoping I have everything I need to depart now. Some ‘tea money’ might be needed to cover the name change of the boat.
While doing this I made a note of the locations I have port clearances for, along with marina bills and spare parts etc, I have pieced together the Itinerary the boat took from Hawaii to Malaysia under the previous owner, Toshi’s command. There are some gaps, but basically it’s as shown below covering the last ten years.

This morning I found out that even though the rigging delivery is scheduled for Friday, they won’t deliver on Friday, prayer day, so who knows!
We went ashore and got provisions for a few more days here. Still I’m enjoying the chance to do some studying on google maps and overlaying them on the chart plotter, can be very useful in remote areas where the official charts can be out by a few miles. Tomorrow I’m going to get the monitor wind vane steering kit out and see how it all goes together. That should be fun.

Paul C.

 

Well the rigging got delayed in China en route here, then more delays in KL, so we have had to just rough it out here at the Rebak resort. Latest is that the rigging will arrive on Friday and we hope to get it rigged, or at least started on Saturday. So I expect checking out of Malaysia on Monday is the best we can hope for.

I took some pictures of the channel into the marina today, you can see how welcoming it becomes as you travel along the little channel after taking a bit of a bashing at sea, not that we did really.

We have had a few walks around the island and spotted monkeys, and lots of this big beaked bird. Need to find out what it is. I think it likes a pint of Guinness maybe?

I climber into the forest a bit, would love to explore more, but within a few minutes things are eating you. should have deet’d up.

One of the tasks I have been working on is the Nav systems and integrating the boats electronics, using a thing called signalK, it’s a modern way of getting everything talking to each other. I’m very pleased with how it’s going. The screen shot above is from my laptop, it’s a program called openCPN which is a very fancy navigation prog. I have it reading the boats data over wifi and displaying on screen, that’s us in the middle with the white dot in the centre. it’s also collecting the AIS data and you can see one boat passing within 3 miles of us, it’s drawn a line of CPA (Closest point of approach). The GRIB weather data is also drawn on the display, but the scale is wrong right now as I downloaded a data set for the whole of SE Asia and the ref points are bigger than I’m zoomed on this sample. I’m just looking at downloading google maps to add into the mix, then it will be very smart.

Time to go and cool down in the pool now, I’m only poolside for the wifi, honest

 

Paul C.

 

 

I had a few titles going through my mind, like “Not my finest hour” or “How Embarrassing” , but on hearing snippets of Kathy’s forthcoming blog, I thought I should get in first, damage limitation being the main aim.
We are currently in Rebak Marina, which is a luxury resort on a private secluded island just off to the north west of the Main Langkawi Island,
It’s a short 2 hour hop from our last port at Kuah town, but due to unforeseen circumstances I managed to make that a little bit longer and a lot more interesting on Friday when we left.

As you can see above we had a double berth at Kuah, so there was an empty space for a boat to fit in on our starboard side. This meant we didn’t need to worry about being pushed onto anyone when we left. So at 10:00 AM we decided to depart, Kathy was on the helm ready to slowly reverse us out, ready to use the bow thruster if needed.
The wind was quite strong now, about 20-25 knots and blowing onto the port quarter of the boat, pushing us away from the pontoon, so a quick reverse and then the bow would blow down in the direction of the exit and away we would go. In theory…
With just a single bow line, and a stern line I let go of the stern line, the boat stayed still and I walked to the bow line and started to un-cleat it. Now the drama starts. Kathy is shouting “Get on the boat Paul” in quite an agitated way, I’m used to this, she doesn’t appreciate just how nimble my ancient frame is, and how I like to jump on at the last minute, but as her cries got louder I looked back and sure enough, the stern was heading of to Rebak on its own, at quite a rate of knots. I re-cleated the bow line and walked back to the stern, sure enough, there was no way I was going to be able to get on. I asked her to throw me the stern line, but when she held up the line, it was obvious it would never reach the pontoon finger. So I walked around the other side of the berth, onto the other spare finger to stop the stern having a big bump when it got there.
By this point Kathy was quite agitated, she has a fear of being on the boat drifting off without me, then she thought we were going to smash ourselves on the other finger. It was all getting a bit much for her, and her cries of despair had alerted our neighbours to the predicament I had created.
No panic, I can handle an audience, usually, after all this isn’t the first time I have messed up mooring or leaving, after all we just needed to pull the stern back and try again, but maybe not let go of the stern line so quickly next time. So I got Kathy to walk to the bow where there was a nice length of rope, pass it to me, I uncoiled it passed the end to Kathy, and instructed her to go back to the stern and tie it on somewhere. This was harder than I expected, Kathy had the gist of it, but didn’t understand that anywhere would do, any cleat or winch would do, but she tried to feed it through the hawse which was full of a big fat (short) mooring line, I was walking back to the end of the pontoon finger with the rest of the line looking at Kathy and giving instructions as to where to tie the line, and just as she got the line around the cleat everything changed. Suddenly I couldn’t see anything, my hearing was odd, my body felt strange, for a split second I was very confused, then it dawned on me I was under water, a few split seconds later I realised the pontoon finger must have shrunk since I last looked, and I had walked right off the end as Kathy was cleating. Part of me found this hilarious, then horror, but a quick pat of my pockets, and Hallelujah, I didn’t have my iPhone on me. Then I remembered how bloody difficult it can be getting back onto the pontoon. The underneath is generally covered in razor sharp barnacles. The Malaysians aren’t the hottest on safety ladders, and my first attempt showed me I couldn’t pull my own weight up. Then a stroke of genius, I still had hold of the mooring line, so I swam to the cleat, cleated Kathy off and used the line to stand on, thereby getting ashore and bringing the boat a bit closer. I did think of trying to pass this off as standard practice for the situation, but looking at the onlookers realised that wouldn’t work. Best just act like this is normal Paul I thought.
So back ashore, I started to pull the boat back over, our neighbour came to help me and joked that he thought I must have jumped in to cool down! that was generous of him, but I felt an idiot. I made idle chat with him, then once we had the boat back I let go of the stern line, he did the same for the bow and off we popped without further issue. We completely forgot to boat hook my cap as we motored past it on the way out of the marina. That was my favourite cap too.
So that should have been enough drama for the day, but no, more was to follow.
As we left the marina we had to cross the entrance to the ferry jetty, at certain times, this gets very busy, and this was one of those times, ferries were queuing up and approaching at different angles, we were motoring though this area just fine when I thought I had better check the engine temperature, as due to the recent problems and the air lock I was a bit concerned. When I looked it appeared to be way too hot and rising. This is bad news. I told Kathy to throttle back, and as soon as we cleared the ferries I stopped the engine, hauled up the staysail, and told Kathy to steer us ahead through the anchorage.
Kathy hadn’t quite seen the funny side of the days activities yet, and was perplexed at the latest development. I wasn’t too concerned as there was 20 knots of wind so we could sail anywhere, I did wonder how you get the mainsail up in 20 knts with no engine to get your nose into the wind. I went below to look at the engine, I had hoped that opening the water filler cap would reveal the air lock had cleared and I could top it up and that would be that, however the water level was fine. Water was exiting the exhaust just fine, I was confused. But no matter Kathy was now shouting that she couldn’t steer and we were going to hit the fuel barge, which to be fair is a lot scarier close up than from shore.
I showed Kathy how we could tack around the anchorage with just the staysail, but she wasn’t a lot happier, some of the gusts now were getting quite big. She continued to steer us around while I scratched my head, opened the air bleed valve on the engine and crawled around the rear of the engine to see if there was anything obvious where the pipes went to the water heater. but everything seemed fine.
So after an hour of prating around, we re-started the engine, and put up the mainsail, with the engine just at tick over, we made course for Rebak.
The engine wasn’t overheating now at idle. Due to the wind direction, which was basically coming from Rebak, we had to tack all the way there, I had one reef in the main, and just the staysail. The genoa might have been better, but I need some more practice in tacking with the Genoa, it’s so big it often has to be manhandled around the inner headsail stay, and under the current circumstances I thought better of it. We also had the problem that it was a Friday today and the Marina office at Rebak shuts early so they can go to Friday prayers, so we were no pushing it to get there on time.
I was now loving this bit, the gusts were pushing us over at times and at one point the rail was just in the water, yet the boat felt very safe, It seemed she would heel so far then be really stiff and heel no more, and there was not much issue with weather helm either.
Looking at the chart plotter, which Kathy had programmed up the night before, I could see some very strategic tacks we could make through the small islands/rocks around us and save a few minutes, definitely worth a try if we were racing, but in each case we would be just half a mile from lee shores , rocky ones at that, so again, I didn’t think it worth it.

For the last tack I pumped up the engine a bit, just to give us a few more degrees and we made the entrance to the marina with about 3 minutes to spare.
We arrived out of the pounding Andaman sea int a tranquil lagoon, and Kathy seemed most relieved, in fact I’m not sure she will want to leave here.
On checking the engine, the air lock had now worked it’s way through and I was able to replace the missing coolant, and as a bonus, the water pipe wasn’t leaking and the oil scavenger connection wasn’t leaking either, so the sump tray was completely dry and clean.
We did have a good laugh about events later, Kathy had thought I had jumped in to swim over to save her, that would have been very gallant of me 😉

Yesterday she spent the day at the poolside reading, I spent the afternoon doing computer / techie things on the boat with a thing called SignalK and openCPN which was great fun. I also found out how much more I can achieve without the internet to help me. I deliberately didn’t buy any internet access for the boat just to see how we get on. We have it at the pool for emergencies 😉 but I found not being able to follow interesting tangents, made me reach my goal much quicker. More on that in a subsequent techie post.

I look forward to seeing Kathy’s take on the events of the day

Paul C.

Finally for the first time in many years I suspect, I had all of the lights on the boat working, and on at the same time. The starboard bow light was intermittent, and it was down to the contacts on the bulb, although they looked fine, they didn’t feel completely at home allowing electricity to pass through.  A new bulb resolved that for now.
I was very pleased to fix the steaming light, after sleeping on it (the problem, not the light), I thought I had to investigate the end of the wire at the bottom of the mast, about a foot sticks out and sure enough the positive wire was corroded so bad it had parted. I might have hinted at the wire quality before and slagged of Ancor, the makers, or so I thought, but looking closer, this wire is standard 2 core american domestic wiring, just like UK twin and Earth 1.5mm², but without the earth.

So with this wire patched up, I expect it will break again soon, all the lights now worked. I have the hose waiting to go on the water heater, but it’s not leaking now and can wait until I next feel in an engine work mood.
I heard the rigging shipped from Florida a few days ago so should be here by Monday, so tomorrow we leave to travel just a few hours north to Rebak marina so Kathy can enjoy the delights of a luxury resort, then on Monday if the rigging is here we will take the boat down to Telaga marina to have it fitted. This will be the last of the jobs planned for here so we’re off to Thailand, really, except we have to come back to Kuah to check out of the country. This may prove tricky as the boat has changed name, registration number, and owner so it wont be on the system as ever having checked in, they could just stamp us out on my passport, and give the boat an exit paper, or they could make life quite difficult, we shall see.

There’s nothing in Rebak for me, well the pool is nice, but I’m going to have fun playing with my new Signal K setup. I plumbed most of in tonight, and I can connect to it via wifi and see the data server (iKommunicate), but no data, I can see an LED flickering on the data server telling me it’s getting data from the AIS, so it’s just a computer thing I need to fix. Once this is going you will be able to connect to Sister Midnight from the internet and see all sorts of exciting data, like the obvious location, course, speed, depth, wind data, battery voltage, but soon I hope to add the dinner menu, latest fish caught etc. the possibilities are endless. However I read today that I have to watch out for foreign states taking over the boat and using it as part of a botnet, or is it a yachtnet/boatnet to bring down other governments. Exciting stuff!

I used to try to document stuff in word, or draw or some other computer package, but more recently I have gone for hand drawing with a pencil and paper and then taking a pic with the iPhone and storing this on the mac. I like this as I generally have the paper backup handy if the mac is in use. Also it’s the only way I practice handwriting these days.

So we had a farewell drink in the marina bar tonight, didn’t need to order the drinks, they knew our round off by heart, other than to check if I was on the diet coke or weak shandy option. Definitely time to move on.

A last sunset picture from here

Paul C.

So today I wondered how best to sort the problems. Firstly the air lock, I got out the manual for the water heater and after reading it, I realised it’s either plumbed in incorrectly, or I don’t understand the system very well. This has nothing to do with the air lock, and this wasn’t mentioned anyway. However after reading the engine manual, it does say to open a certain valve before filling with water to avoid air locks. Duh!! RTFM Paul. So I did that and it helped, but didn’t completely solve the problem. I ran the engine for an hour and the temperature stayed constant, so I think it’s ok. Anyway, I’m going to be replacing the hoses shortly so can go through the whole process again then.
Yesterday I traced all the wires for the solar and wind generators to make sure I understood how they are wired in. then last night I turned off the charger before bed, and just left on the equipment we would run on a normal night passage, mast head light, AIS, radio, fridge etc to see how much power we consumed. The charger said 25Ah over about 8 hours, which seems very reasonable. Once up I put the solar back on, and we were fully charged within a few hours, thats with my rubbish solar panels that only generate 200W in total, and then only in very bright sunshine. Typically they put out about 5 amps total. The big thing is the wind gen, this is wired into the main battery without any switch, or even a voltage regulator. It’s hard to know what it’s doing, it can generate up to 30A of charge at 14V, it’s basically a car alternator with windmill sails. It has been quite breezy the last few days.
I’m looking into the whole battery charging business thing, as this will be important when we head off, many cruisers spend an hour or two running the engine each day, this is a very bad idea as it costs a lot, is noisy, makes heat and doesn’t do the engine any good. The problem is that boat batteries are very complicated to charge, you have to work within very tight restraints to get the charged fully but without damaging them. Generally you spend most days discharging to 50% then recharging to 80%, however you need to get a full charge in every so often to stop them degrading. On top of that they should be equalised once in a while to stop sulphation. As I see it connecting 3 or 4 generators of power, via individual intelligent regulators that measure current flow and voltage, before determining what voltage to try to generate or current to supply, is asking for trouble. Also I have two banks of batteries, 4 for the house and 1 for cranking, both banks are never going to be in the same state.
Still I’m enjoying learning about these subjects. Ask me any question you like about lead cell construction 😉

So off to town to buy the bits I need, I was very pleased to buy a relay and associated cable from a garage on the edge of town, without speaking any Malay, and him not speaking English. 

From the garage I bought a litre of acrylic paint for the boat, this should be good for 6 years apparently, the blue paint I put on the side in May has faded on the side of the boat that gets most sunshine. It wasn’t a fancy paint, but I have been assured that normal acrylic paint is by far the best to go with. Very cheap too.

I also picked up 8 metres of radiator hose for the water heater, this should leave me with 3 metres spare I can take for a trip around the world before throwing it away. I picked up a strip of 12V LEDS that I plan to install in the cockpit so we have a bit more light for dinner, but yet to work out where or how to install them.

Finally, back to the mast problem, I mentioned how I’m putting 12V into the cable at the bottom of the mast but getting nowt out at the top, well I had an idea, if I swapped the positive/negative of the wires around at the base, and use the mast as a ground I could work out which wire had the break in. Sure enough, it was the positive wire, because by sending +12v up the old negative wire, and using the mast as the negative, I could light up the lamp. Of course I don’t think I can use the mast as a return, sending an Amp or more through the rigging might cause some corrosion. But I’m thinking I could drop a wire down to the spreader lights and use that as the negative return. It’s not often I have both lights on anyway. The cable that has failed is the expensive Ancor pre-tinned ‘Marine’ cable !

The rigging hasn’t shipped from Florida yet, so I expect we are here for another 5-7 days min. So on Thursday we’re going to leave our berth here and head to an anchorage called “The hole in the wall” for an overnighter, then onto Rebak Marina for the weekend, or longer, until the rigging arrives, when we will drop down to Telaga Marina where the rigger is based. Hopefully the rigging will be fitted in one day, and early next week we will be off to Thailand.

Paul C.

 

 

I have found the location of the starting problem, it’s the starting relay, or the connector on it.

This is not meant to reflect on the QA standards of Ireland at all 😉
I can’t work out which is faulty, the connector or the relay, as every time I unscrew it from its location to test it, the relay works fine, but once back in place it fails, I can’t get my multimeter onto the pins when it is in place, right at the rear of the engine by the gearbox. I suspect the connector more than the relay, but I will change both. Suffice it to say it’s working now, but I expect it will stop when next needed. Fortunately Car ownership 101 taught us how to start a car without the key, a basic Scouse right of passage, so I have kept a short length of wire near the starter. I’m off up the mast now, but wanted to share the following with you…

Congkak
I have seen a lot of lovely carved  wooden creations which I wondered what they were used for, now I have found out that they are for a game called Congkak.

I have included the rules below should you want to try this one at home.

 

Paul C.

The postman came late yesterday with goodies, but I missed him at the office, so collected the bits, a new water gauge and a bow light, this morning. So after a couple of poached eggs with Kathy I got stuck into the jobs.

1. Battery Charger
   Yesterday I was doing some testing to understand how much power I was getting from the wind generator and solar system. During the testing I noticed the battery charger was overheating and shutting down, further investigation showed the fan was broken on the charger. I picked one up yesterday and fitted it this morning. Job done, lets hope it lasts a while.
2. Engine Water coolant leak
   I spent some time yesterday in hardware stores looking for hose fittings to improve this connection to the engine, but there aren’t any. I will probably post on some sailing forums to see what others do. I noticed the hose was quite brittle and I’m going to replace it all next week. For now I cut back the bad hose and re-fitted it. 
   This worked, but a lot more cooling fluid poured out of the hose than I expected, I think the calorifier must hold a lot, and be located higher than the pipe. Managed to catch most of it in a 5 litre jug, but when time came to refill it, I had a litre left over, which in my mind means there is an air lock in the system now. I was expecting to have to add an extra litre. Anyway, I hoped that if I ran the engine a bit then it might work it’s way through.
   The engine wouldn’t start, turning the key, gives a click from the engine, but the starter doesn’t turn. Really disappointing and I assumed the solenoid had jammed, so a gentle tap on the solenoid was tried, no luck.
   I hot wired the solenoid and the engine started, the water level dropped, but not enough. So now I have two show stopping faults, when before I only had an intermittent drip.
3. Water levels
   The port water tank level gauge had packed in, the float didn’t float and its magnets didn’t magnetise, so Kathy replaced it for me. I have wired up the switch that used to just show the starboard tank level so that it now switches between port and starboard. I’ve never had such sophistication on a boat before, very posh. Hopefully we can top up now before the tank gets empty, that will save the pump running on an empty tank, and air spurting out the taps when we are empty.

   

   

 

 

 

 

4. Steaming light on mast

The new light finally arrived, and I popped up the mast for a fitting 😉 Well the mast is sort of oval shaped in cross section and the light has a flat back, I took the old light down and worked out a way to use its bracket for the new light. It looks like it will work well, but by now the sunlight was going so Kathy and I headed off to the pool to watch the sunset and have a cooling swim.

Tonight I have been studying the wiring diagrams for the engine, I now know far more about the Volvo MD22 (AKA Perkins M50) than I ever wanted to know. Things like, the engine ground is isolated from the boats electrical ground when starting or stopping the engine. Doesn’t say why, but might be related to galvanic corrosion caused by heavy currents.
Anyway the click I can hear when I turn the key to start, isn’t the solenoid, it’s a separate relay that switches the starter solenoid. I found that 12v leaves the control panel, and the relay is clicking with it, so it must be the wire or relay contacts from there that leads to the solenoid, as there isn’t any voltage getting to the solenoid. I’m very disappointed with the electrical side of the engine. It’s only ten years old, very low hours, yet the electrics are giving me too many problems. I think the control panel is damaged because it’s out in the cockpit, the UV caused the corners to crack so moisture gets in and has its evil way. How long should water hoses last, these are only 10 years old. The engine on Stardust is 8 years old and still looks new.

Not looking forward to tomorrow, the relay I need to get too is in a most inaccessible place. I will do the mast light first before it gets too hot. Hopefully if I can sort the engine tomorrow we can get out of here on Tuesday and go for a sail and anchor overnight somewhere nearby for a change. I’m hoping the rigging will arrive in a few days time and we can depart for Thailand.

 

Paul C.

 

Popped up the mast today to replace the Navigation light with a new Nasa Marine SuperNova Tricolour/Anchor light.
I’m going to wait until sunset and go to the bar to see how bright it looks. Kathy thinks this a fine Idea.

So a few pics from above.

 

Paul C.