Yes I was talking with chappy earlier at the fuel dock who spoke Malay and he enquired about the name, he was an Iggy Pop fan and liked the name, I think? Anyway, I pointed out that it often caused amusement with the Malaysians when I had to give them the name, and he explained that it would, given sister means gay here. The Malaysian government have banned gays, and officially these aren’t any, except, it seems, for my boat,”Gay Midnight” and she is quite brazen about it !!
I was up early and got the boat ready for the trip, fuelled up and left at ten, after giving some boat handling lessons to a lovely couple from Estonia who are just starting their sailing adventures, having bought their first boat here, from a guy I became friendly with when Tim was over last year, and now they want to head off into the blue yonder, just once he has worked out how to leave the dock.
The wind was strongish from the east, 10 knots at Langkawi, building to 20 by the time I arrived near Penang. It was a great sail down, with thunderstorms threatening all the time and plenty of things to dodge. I will write more tomorrow, as right now I’m at anchor in a rather uncomfortable spot just north of Penang. I couldn’t get to the shelter of the main island before dark, so I pushed on to the last island before Penang, much further than I had hoped, but then I was making between 6 and 7.5 knots most of the time, under full sail. All of the islands en route are long thin affairs and generally lie North/South so great if the wind is from the east or west, but by the time I got here the wind had changed to the NNW, So I sheltered on the SSE corner of the island, not much shelter as the waves, which had risen to 1.5m were getting round the whole island and the wind, a steady 20knots was everywhere. Anyway I dropped the anchor and it’s holding very well, I just have to pretend I’m crossing the Atlantic and it’s a bit choppy an the boat is bouncing around a lot, in order to get some sleep. As I write this the wind has dropped to 15 knots and the sea calmed a little, so that’s good.
Things I need to put in tomorrows blog, once I work out how to get the pictures off my iPad are, birds on the sheets, Caught a fish, but it got away, and nearly took me with it, Almost drove through the biggest fishing net I have ever seen, self steering hassles, and fish sticks up close.
Paul Collister