Author: paulcollister

Todays main activity was popping into town and getting some hard to find chemicals. I bought:

2 litres of Acetone, for cleaning surfaces before applying epoxy glue
1 litre of MEK, not sure what that is for, but heard it’s very useful to have. I think it’s a solvent for epoxy, which means it can dissolve my boat, hmmm.
1 litre of Isopropyl, or something like that, another good cleaner, I think its like alcohol. Chemistry isn’t my strong point
1kg of Oxalic Acid crystals, these dissolve in warm water to make an excellent cleaner for most things, but it works very well in cleaning teak.

The total price for this was £10, can’t complain. I bought this from a shop run by a rather famous local man called Mr Ong, the chemical man. He is 91 and is thinking of retiring soon. I had a brief chat with him in the shop. It’s amazing what you can buy here.  Later I bought some sheets of hard rubber/plastic, used for cutting soles for shoes from a shoe repair and leather supplier. This will fit under the bowsprit nicely and protect the sprit and the galvanising on the anchor, again, just £2.

I bought some plastic sheeting in a shop and asked for a discount as it was a bit shabby, the guy dragged his abacus over and used it to knock 10% off, very impressive how fast he used it.

I use Uber to get around, they are very good, cheap and most of the drivers are ethnic Chinese so their English is generally better than the ethnic Malaysians. As was usual I had to explain everything about the boat and our plans, and as usual, the drivers are amazed we are sailing around the world, after lots of questions this driver asked me if I was a proper sailor man, I replied yes, I suppose so, to which he launched into singing “I’m popeye the sailor man, I live in ….”. When he extracted from me that I was doing this trip with my girlfriend, he started exclaiming over and over, “So Romantic, So romantic”. I would have said, stop here, drop me off here, yes, this motorway flyover is just fine. However it’s difficult to change your destination on Uber, even harder not to give your driver 5 stars after the trip, just in case you get him on the way home.

Later back at the boat I pulled the aircon off the deck and cleaned up, we will get this deck looking fit for purpose soon.

Tonight we went for dinner at Supertanker, a giant Chinese / Thai foodcourt. Erik drove us there and I think Kathy enjoyed it. I love the place, great food, dirt cheap and a lovely busy but friendly atmosphere. I had a tasty chocolate and banana pancake for pudding from a vendor who is famous for his wares.

General chores tomorrow, specifically the sails and control lines and the water tank guages.

Paul C

 

Well not really, but getting close now.
Firstly some pictures of the Kek Lok Si temple visit

I enjoyed the temple visit very much, they sure know how to do Buddhas over here.

So earlier in the week we went to the Mall at Queensbay, they usually have something going on in the main open areas, today was no exception, I think they were selling power exercise drinks and potions. Quite mad if you ask me, however the two kids joining in made it seem ok, except at the end when they turn to face each other, I think the boy thinks the girl is going to high five him, but she walks right past when she realises he is way to young for her. Tragic.

Saturday we went into town for a veggie meal, great that they have such places here and the food was good. We passed a lot of street food hawkers on the way

Time Square was interesting, I had never really looked around inside, quite classy.

After the meal, we popped along to the prom area where there was a big display of bears, think Cows, Penguins, Liverpudlian Lambananna, or just the latest way to move a lot of plastic around the world. But to be fair it has raised a lot of money for UNICEF, an organisation I have a lot of time for since I saw loads of little boys and girls marching to school for the first time in post Taliban Afghanistan, all carrying UNICEF bags with pencils paper etc.
Each bear represented a country, but we had one for the UK, which got me pondering again on our national identity. It had been a bad week on that front, firstly there was the independence day, when the British flag is lowered and the Malaysian flag replaces it. The whole country celebrates this day, then on the same day the taxi driver told me his son had graduated uni in Dublin and now lived near the post office on O’Connell’ Street there, and did I know it. Felt like shouting, look I wasn’t born then, it’s not my fault 😉 Anyway, so after trudging over to the E for England section, then over to G for Great Britain, I ended up at the UK bit, each bear represents an artists impression of his country and I was keen to see what we had, hopefully not a bear in a bowler hat with brolley. So I was rather disappointed to see this chappy. Perhaps he should have been placed by Germany, France, and the other EU countries, but facing the wrong way!

This one reminded me of the burning man, I named it burning bear.

Now I expect you are all thinking, that’s all well and good Paul, but what about the bowsprit!
Well I have finished working on that now. I need to replace the sprit and the platform at some point, probably when I’m in Thailand, but for now I have re-assembled everything and we are fit to slip our lines and sail off into the sunset, well once we finish the other 40 non-bowsprit related jobs.
Before I replaced the windlass, I thought I should re-fit the chain pipes, these are the metal tubes the anchor chain slides down. They were loose on the deck and would allow rain and waves to get into the chain locker, making it damp and smelly. When I removed them, I could see that they had never been sealed to the deck, and in fact worse than that they had leaked water into the deck core and the wood was rotted.

This can be a really bad deal requiring the deck fiberglass having to be cut out and just loads of horrible stuff that takes forever to do. Fortunately, these boats were designed with this problem in mind, and will not allow the damp/rot to travel far. In my case I was able to scrape it all out as it only went a few cm into the deck. Then I could fill the area with thickened epoxy

The deck is stronger now and this problem shouldn’t happen again, at least not here.
This gave Kathy an opportunity to polish up the chain pipes ready for refitting

Finally I had everything in place and brought the anchor back on board, I’m still trying to work out how best to stow it, it’s not a comfortable fit on the bow sprit and has to be lashed in, just not quite sure how yet.

I reconnected the Navigation lights on the bows pulpit at the connections in the chain locker and was most disappointed to find the port light didn’t work, after making sure the connections at both ends were perfect. I lost count of the times I went between the pulpit and the chain locker with my multimeter, but eventually I found a break in the wire about 6 inches from the light. Now the break was caused by corrosion inside the wire, some distance from the end connections. I only mention this because the previous owner spent a fortune using the very highest quality pre-tinned wire, which in my opinion is useless, or as effective as gold plated loudspeaker cables, i.e. not useful at all.

Tomorrow I go in search of Oxalic acid and Acetone to restock, then more cleaning up the deck and rigging the dutchman, which isn’t a euphemism, all will be revealed.

 

Paul C.

This week has been slow, but mostly enjoyable for me.
The main focus has been on this bloody bowsprit. For those of you who haven’t worked it out yet, it’s the pretty big wooden stick that protrudes from the bow of the boat. It’s job is to allow us to get a bigger sail on the boat than would otherwise be possible. Boats don’t have them these days, as a longer boat means a faster boat anyway, so boats tend to be longer and also the old fashioned look of the square rigged boat with the multiple headsails is not in fashion.
So just to give a chronology of events on this bloody stick so far.

1. Decide the varnish needs re-doing on the bowsprit as it’s very stained and missing in lots of places, also there’s a small bit of rot near the tip, so no harm in looking further. The whole job should be done in a few days max.
2. So I remove the pulpit rail, that’s the steel tubing that you hold onto when working up there, I notice the wiring to the port and starboard lights on the rail is faulty so spend half a day renewing that, during the process the starboard bulb falls apart in my hand.
3. Remove the teak platform, this is the decking you stand on in the pulpit area, and the supporting steel frame. I notice the platform is very weak and split in many places so a lot of gluing and clean up ensues, another day lost.

1. The frame has a crack in it, I decide to ignore, then after refitting I decide to fix, so off to a steel works to get it welded, two half days gone there.

1. 4 days spent cleaning and sanding the varnish on the front of the bow sprit, but the wood is so deeply stained, it’s not the most impressive of sprits, and never will be.
2. Now there seems to be some rot under the anchor windlass, this is the very heavy motor that pulls up the anchor / chain and is installed on top of the bowsprit. I remove the windlass to get a better look, sort of wished I hadn’t, the rot is quite bad, goes all the way into the sprit. I think I’m ok for coastal sailing, but I need to replace that sprit before I contemplate taking on any gales. This will not be an easy job and I have decided to wait until we are in Thailand to do the work, as they have better wood and plenty of skilled carpenters there.
3. I remove all the rot I can see, but suspect there’s more under the sprit, and fill the voids with thickened epoxy, this should be good for a while but it’s hard to know. How do you know how strong it needs to be, and how do you work out how strong it currently is. I do know the sprit behaves as a post under compression, and the damaged area is clamped with a steel plate ( The Windlass and backing plate) on either side of the damaged area, and they wont compress easily. 
4. On trying to put the windlass back in place I notice the cover I put over it, while it was on its side doesn’t seem to have stopped the rain getting in and the inside of the windlass is full of water! This could be really bad, I don’t want to even try to use it if it’s rusting, as a good cleaning will save it. If I leave a spanner on deck here for a couple of days, it’s very brown by the time I find it, the constant rain/heat seems to have a bad affect on metal. A new windlass will cost £2-3000, so I decide to take this one apart and clean/grease it up.
5. Three of the four screws on the windlass cover come off, the fourth has been stripped by a previous gorilla, I also discover after removing the bottom metal plate that half the base of the windlass has rusted away, leaving a huge mass of aluminum oxide, a whitish crumbly powder. Now I’m starting to wonder why I’m bothering, and why did I ever give up stamp collecting as a child.
6. I drill of the head of the fourth screw and voila, we are inside, well nearly. I have access to the motor, and I can see the gears are all encased inside another unit which is sealed and looks ok. A good cleaning followed by a healthy spraying with WD40 has it looking a lot better. When I power it up, it runs very well, seems to be even faster than before. Must dismantle it completely soon and give it a full service.
7. Start to reassemble everything now I have the frame back but find the holes in the teak platform where the screws used to be are massive and this is why the platform was tied down before, so I fill all the holes with thickened epoxy and will try to re-assemble everything again tomorrow.

All in all this job that was meant to take a few days is looking like two weeks, and I still need to build and fit a new bowsprit, build a new platform and service the windlass. The thing is, if you plan to go sailing offshore, especially if you are crossing oceans where you will be bound to be hit by severe weather at some point, I think it’s really important to have full confidence in every inch of the boat, and turning a blind eye to something that might be OK, because it might also be a lot of hassle to check fully, is just not an option.
Also I must say I really enjoy the aspect of finding local skilled people to help out. The trip to the industrial part of town (Batu Maung, behind the airport) was great, a lovely big workshop with laser cutters, giant bending machines and a few dozen guys all working hard. Also Miss Chew, who like many businesses I have dealt with seemed to be showing the men how to do things, was great, she understood the job perfectly, offered advice on options for repair, and did the job on time for just £6. The crack was quite big, and I cant even see where it was now, just shiny steel, very impressive.

This is Inge, a Swede from another yacht here with me at a cafe outside the steel fabricators on Monday. These candles/giant joss sticks were about to be lit as it’s the end of August and the Chinese are crazy about keeping the ghosts happy and away

Today, Thursday, when I collected the frame with Kathy the Jossies were almost out, in fact in a few minutes time the fire brigade arrived and put them out before they were dismantled. The ghosts are quite chilled in September I understand.

During the week we visited a very big temple, more on that in a separate post.

And apologies if you were expecting notifications to be emailed to you of new posts, the system broke, due to the way security works on wordpress, this blog software I’m using. They upgraded the software to make it more secure and broke it, I have made it less secure and it works again, but the notifications may find it harder to traverse some spam filters. For the techies following, it’s all related to domain names of the From; envelope From: and Host needing to match. It’s complicated, too complicated for me.

Paul C.

Saturday lunchtime we jumped into an uber cab and headed off to see the reclining Buddha at the Wat Chayamangkalaram temple in George Town. This 33m long Buddha is known locally as the sleeping buddha and the temple is built over 5 acres of land which our good old Queen Victoria gave to the Thai people. Nice of her to give someone else’s land away so easily.

After a bit of Thai temple visiting we popped over the road to see what the Burmese had to offer, and we weren’t disappointed. A vast array of buddhas are housed within several temples and shrines in the Dhammikarama Burmese Temple. I saw buddhist monks throwing water over people and chanting, not sure what it will achieve, but it seemed to be quite a serious affair.

So we then headed around the corner to the Gurney Drive Plaza, This is just a big upmarket mall, where you can buy western goods at ridiculous prices. I noticed most of the clientele were not Malay but Chinese ethnicity, I suspect this reflects the distribution of wealth here. It’s a great place if you’re a westerner looking for weetabix or Campbell’s soup, or an aspirational local, who thinks it’s cool to buy Leffe lager for £6 a bottle (I actually paid £4 for a bottle of german alcohol free beer, the first I had seen in Malaysia, so I shouldn’t criticise really). Personally I hate this sort of place, it was such a contrast with the basic lifestyle I associate with Buddhism we had just been experiencing.

From  the Mall we headed up the road to a famous hawker food market on Gurney drive. we sat down at a table next to a vegetarian Chinese food stall and had two fine noodle meals, don’t know any more details as my Chinese is rubbish. I do know that as I placed the bag with my zero alcohol beer on the floor, it exploded and sprayed fizzy beer all around the table, rather embarrassing, but I can’t help thinking Karma played a part in this.

So back to my beloved bowsprit, I bolted the platform frame onto the sprit after giving  it a good cleaning, I had noticed a crack in the frame, it’s on the bottom right, and really needed welding. I decided it can wait, and proceeded to fix the 13 bolts that hold it on to the sprit, not so easy when balancing from above. Of course once I had completed I started to consider when I would need to do the welding and where would I be? (probably hundreds of miles from a welder). On consideration, I realised I would never be in a better place or at a better time to get the welding done, so off with the 13 bolts and today I took a taxi ride to the local steel fabricators for them to weld and reinforce the frame.

The actual platform is fabricated from teak and had a lot of splits in it, it also is getting very thin and very grey. I glued it back together over several nights and today I gave the teak a rub down and a deep clean, it looks a bit better now. I will be getting a new one made, might do it myself if I can source some local hardwood, or teak.

I’m hoping to put the boat back together by the end of the week and then head off north again. However it might take another week depending on how much sightseeing we do.

I also got the internal air-con running tonight and the boat is now quite cool, but it’s way too noisy for me, so I think I would like to relocate the air-con to the lazarette or somewhere out of the way before I lose the window unit.

Paul C.

 

 

 

A short post about Friday and a recipe for the blues.

1. First spend days, no weeks, nay, nearly months, cleaning, sanding and polishing your new boat.
2. Stand back and admire.
3. Decide to paint the blue strip on the side now the varnish is looking good.
4. Fill a jug (1/2 pint) with blue gloss paint (Marine and expensive).
5. Stand on the pontoon, brush in one hand, paint in the other.
6. Jump onto the boat holding both items carefully, wouldn’t want an accident 😉
7. Don’t forget before item 6, to make sure you tie a strong piece of rope about 6 inches above the side deck, in the area you are going to jump onto.
8. Jump, trip over said rope, throw, not pour, but throw all of the paint (did I mention it’s gloss) over the boat.
9. Make sure to cover awning, coach roof, power cables, oars, air-con, coachroof side, portlights, deck, grab-rails, cap-rail and yourself in blue paint.
10. Stand back and admire / cry
11. Make matters worse by rubbing paint with cloth and spreading everywhere.

Not my finest moment I have to admit. I would love to have a picture to show the mess, but Kathy rushed to the scene on hearing my screams and we both proceeded to get into the cleaning up task. I’m happy to say, that with the help of a big jug of turpentine, you wouldn’t be able to tell there had been an accident, other than for the canopy, which has a limited life anyway.
Yesterday, I varnished over a spot of blue paint I had missed on the rub rail, I decided to leave that as a permanent reminder to myself to be more careful in future.

A less traumatic post follows of our Saturday excursions to two extremes adjacent to each other, The Buddhist shrines, and the Western modern day equivalent, the Mall

And just so there’s a pic with this post, how about another bowsprit update 😉

Paul C.

 

Yesterday morning started well, a power cut, which caused one of our neighbours to get cross with another boat owner over tripping the power. When there is an electrical fault a circuit breaker kills all the power to all the boats.
Well 30 minutes later Kathy made some toast and as she pushed the toast into the machine the power went off and Kathy screeched a bit saying that there where sparks inside the toaster. I presumed it was probably not a big deal and that the power problem was related to the other boat. however after I had a look at the toaster I found she had been trying to toast a bulldog clip

I popped outside to check, and we had indeed tripped the whole marina, but worse our neighbour was now storming over to the other boat to give them hell for tripping again, I tired to stop him, but he was convinced it was their fault, so off he went.
Kathy doesn’t keep the clips on a hook just above the toaster anymore 🙂

The rest of the day was spent sanding and filling holes, I scraped out all of the dead black wood in the cap rail, and made up some teak coloured epoxy filler, however, the colour went black at the last minute, I don’t know why, but I had had enough so I filled the holes with the black filler, It doesn’t look as bad as it was, but I’m going to cut it all out at a later date and put teak in, probably when I get to Thailand and can get some good quality teak for a decent price. I might replace the whole rail then. For now I wanted to get on with the varnishing and get the rail watertight. After I had got a ‘primer’ coat of varnish on, I put my brush in a jar of turps in the cockpit and jumped ashore to get a shower with the pontoon hose, after the shower I threw my shoes back onto the boat and was very pleased that I was able to get them into the cockpit from about 5 metres, I expect you have guessed the rest, a perfect hit, turps everywhere!

Today I was up early, we had a massive squall in the night and a huge amount of rain. I dried the woodwork with a towel, had a coffee, then got the second coat of varnish down. It’s looking good now, I had hoped to get 4 coats of varnish on the cap rail and bow sprit by Saturday, and I’m on target for that.
Kathy and I got off into town at lunch time, we have found out that we can summon an Uber taxi that takes us from the marina into Georgetown for about 9MYR, which is under £2, it costs four times as much for a regular taxi, and they cant find us.

I found a source for a water pump for the air-con, so I’m hoping to fit that in the next few days and if it works, I can lose the window mounted unit and get the deck clear. I also found some very long 5mm wood drills for a £1 each which I’m going to use to drill a few inspection holes in the bowsprit, I need to know how bad the rot is there.

After the hardware shopping we joined the backpackers and walked the streets looking at the street art and took in an exhibition of art/photography where the artist had chopped the pictures up a reassembled them in an interesting way.

We ended the day with a meal in our favourite Indian restaurant, I made a classic mistake of ordering a tandoori chicken and saying I didn’t want it too hot, so he went off with order, “Tandoori chicken, no hot”, It took a while, I presumed because they were cooking it without the spices just for me, but instead I realised when I bit into a cold lump of chicken, that blew my head off with spices, that the delay must have been while they shoved my chicken in the freezer. Note to self, use the word spicy, not hot. A bas ride home was quick, and an early night, hoping to get coat 3 of the varnish on tomorrow early and then more boat jobs.

Some pics from the day:

Paul C

I started on the bowsprit early because the epoxy was taking to long to get hard and sandable on the cap rail repairs, so rather than finish that I jumped into the stripping the bowsprit. This required removing the anchor, then it’s chain, as I thought this would be a good time to inspect it all and check out what the little cable ties signified. The PO used an interesting system. After the first ten metres of chain goes out there are 5 cable ties over a few chain links, or at least there would be if one hadn’t broken off at some point. These 5 mean that there are another 50 metres of chain available. Then after another 10 metres has gone out there are 4 cable ties, indicating that there are 40 metres of chain left. This continues to near the end of the chain, where there is one cable tie on the chain, indicating 10 metres left, which in fact is more like 5. I like to work out how much chain I need to put out, so say I’m anchoring in 4 metres of water, I want 5 times as much chain, that’s called a scope of 5:1, so I put 20 metres out, I think that is the same as saying I have 40 metres left, not the most intuitive system.   I have some lovely bright Day-Glo fluorescent cable ties I will add to the chain, 1 for 10 metres out, 2, for 20 etc etc.

So today and yesterday was all about preparing the bowsprit for varnish, Kathy stayed indoors mostly enjoying the cooler climate, and helping with jobs below. There was fun last night when the power went to the pontoons, and when we yachties tried to reset it the master trip kept blowing, so we ended up disconnecting boats to find the offender, which we did in the end, but not before we had upset one of the residents here, but that’s another story.

Tomorrow I hope to get the first coat of varnish on the rail and bowsprit, but first we have to clean out the chain locker while the chain and rope are out. That should be fun, I believe it contains several inches of sea bed samples (mud) from everywhere between Hawaii and Penang, and who knows what might be in that mud. You can take it as read that Kathy wont be digging through the mud 😉

Hoping to do some more sightseeing on Tuesday, perhaps a trip to the big park / funicular railway up the hill.

Paul C.

 

Kathy wanted me to blog these pictures from Thursday

And just one of the bowsprit for good measure

 

Paul C.

I finished sanding down the starboard side today, there’s a lot of rot around some of the bolts holding the rail down. However it doesn’t extend very far and doesn’t affect the strength of the fastenings, so I’m cutting / scraping out the rot and either filling with thickened epoxy or adding wooden insets.
I think I went a bit far on reducing the amount of hardener in the epoxy today as it’s taking a long time to go off, and consequently I can’t move onto the next stage. This forced me to start on the bowsprit.

I removed the pulpit, and tomorrow I will remove the platform to get full access to the sprit, I don’t think it’s been properly varnished since new. I’m also going to go in search of a carpenter to make me a new platform, this one is now quite thin and split in places.
In order to get the platform off, I had to get the anchor off, so thought this would be an ideal time to get all the chain out, check it, and push Kathy into the chain locker to give it a good scrubbing up, I would do it myself, except I’m too big, and we don’t have any victorian chimney sweep boys available.

I took the picture above, the guy on the left is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and that’s me on the right. I think you have to agree the likeness is uncanny!  And we are both working on great engineering projects, him on the launch of the SS Great Britain, and me doing the same for the SV Sister Midnight. If you don’t know who ISB is, then don’t worry, but you should probably read more about engineering (Thanks to Tony Wilson for that line).

As you might have seen from Kathy’s post, Bandanas are all the rage on Sister Midnight today. I need one to stop the sweat dripping down onto my varnishing as I work, Kathy has one just to look cool.

Paul C.

So the elements laid on a good sunset for our last night in Langkawi, I meant to put this picture up the other day, the beams of light must be caused by the mountain tops illuminating a strata of cloud. Quite fascinating, at least to me.

Now we are boaty tourists, the plan is to work hard on the boat with frequent breaks sightseeing. Our first trip into Penang was a bit rushed but we did get to see an interesting exhibition of old photographs of Penang, Kathy is reading up on the history of the place, and guess what, the Brits don’t come out of it too well, surprise surprise.

I think I’m a bit used to SE Asia now, but I forget how strange it must all be for Kathy having never been east of Kalamos in Greece.

Spotted some kittens playing, Kathy wanted one, and of course I would love to have obliged, but the thought of splitting them up seemed so unfair 😉

 

Back at the boat I have started on the starboard side cap rail and coaming. This side has more damage, but I think I can repair the wood sufficiently.

One day I might replace the whole rail, but there are other priorities right now.
Since we arrived I have checked off quite a few tasks, we have a new mixer tap in the galley, so now we have hot water for doing the dishes. I have stowed the old CQR anchor in the lazarette and also re-organised the stowage, there’s a chance the fenders will all fit into the locker, which would be amazing.

The best bit was connecting the boats internal Air-Con into a supply of tap water from the pontoon, as it’s own sea water cooling pump has failed. This worked, which proved the refrigerator part of the AC is working, so I can now hunt down a water pump in Penang, the challenge is to find a pump that works with salt water, runs continuously, is quiet, and not too expensive.

Back to the sanding

Paul C.