The trip from Pulau Tiga to Labuan took about 5 hours and was pretty uneventful, it rained for most of the trip, quite heavy at times, so I took the opportunity to see if I could use the radar to plot the rain’s progress. Rain shows up on the radar quite well, so you can see the area it covers and watch it move, however, the radar also has built in rain removal, so you can see objects like ships and land through the rain. I couldn’t work out how to use this, the radar on Lady stardust had a knob you twiddled to adjust the rain sensitivity, but this one is more sophisticated, and requires me to RTFM ( do some reading). I pulled into the same berth I was in last time I was here, except this time Isabelle was in the next berth and jumped out of her cockpit to take my lines, which was nice. We first met her on the Santobung river and then again in KK at the Sutera harbour Marina. It’s quite a small well connected community of cruisers up here on the NE coast of Borneo, many of them don’t see much reason to leave.
Ian & Marilyn were also in Labuan when I arrived, their cat, pictured below leaving for Tiga, is huge. We had become friends back in Miri, I helped them wire up an anchor windlass wireless remote. I was invited around for a ginger beer tasting, (homebrew piss-up more like) with all the other yachties in the marina, and I had assumed ginger beer would be quite un alcoholic, wrong again. After one glass I had that uneasy feeling that everything was a bit wobbly, my head wasn’t clear and I was about to start talking nonsense. Still it was good to meet the other guys
Craig, pictured below with his partner and dog, lives on a large powerboat a few berths along from me, but he has just bought a big old steel yacht opposite me, and he rows back and forth, as it’s quicker than a long trek around the marina wall.
Bill was another guest, he’s from Australia and built his own steel yacht a few decades ago, 800 km from the sea inland in Australia, and has been sailing her around asia with his Columbian wife ever since. I tried to practice my Spanish with her, and got into an argument where I tried to persuade her that she was pronouncing the Spanish LL wrong, I think it’s a Columbian thing 😉 .
So finally I had to get down to doing some of the bigger jobs I had been putting off, first off was wiring in the new sat phone system, which is the iridium go, this allows us to stay in touch when well offshore, and to download the latest weather reports. it comes with free phone and SMS calls, well I say free, it’s about £100 / month contract, they should have chucked an iPhone X in for that price.
The problem with this install is routing the cable to the antenna, I had also decided to fit the wifi antenna to the solar panel frame at the same time, as the cable could take the same route. Everything in the lockers at the stern of the boat had to come out, most of it fitted on the other cockpit benches as you can see, the ropes all went onto the deck.
The quarter berth also had to be emptied into the main cabin. All in all I spent two days running the cables, I did lots of other little jobs along the way, and l lost a lot of skin with grazing and cuts.
All is installed now, and looks like it should work well, however I don’t want to activate my sat contract until I want to start using it. Daft to pay when I have good wifi here, and probably across the Philippines and Japan.
Yesterday was Isabelle’s birthday and she was doing drinks and nibbles on her boat at 6, but before that I had to evacuate my boat, I thought I was on fire, but the hotel groundsmen next to the marina were burning the undergrowth along the edge of their grounds. I thought this was inconsiderate, but it turned out they were trying to smoke out a large cobra snake that had taken up residence there. I had to leave the boat for an hour and I was in the middle of sorting out the oil leak at the time and was covered in oil. I must have looked odd to the scores of tourists passing by on their day trip motorboats.
The engine had been using oil, not a lot, but too much for my liking. so I cleaned out the drip tray which seemed to have about a pint of oil in it, the next day I had a new trickle, which was good, as it confirmed that the leak was from the sump area. This is where mobile phones come into their own, I was able to get the camera close to leak and I’m pretty sure it’s coming out of the sump drain pipe connection, the problem is I can’t access it easily to tighten the nut, but I did a reasonable job. I will know soon if it worked.
Today brought the job I could no longer find a good enough excuse to delay any longer. It was replacing the hot water calorifier pipes. You can see below how cracked the outer surface of the pipe is, the ends had been leaking too. I have been carrying the replacement pipe around for over a year, and my big fear was that once I got the pipe off, the new one might not go on with the tight curves needed. I can’t run the engine without these pipes. 
In the end the fitting of the pipes went quite easily, I had to drain the coolant from the engine, then flushed out the system with fresh water before adding antifreeze/rust inhibitor. Of course I can’t work with fluids without getting them everywhere, also the coolant is harmful to skin, so that was fun trying to keep dry.
Before: (working well)
The pipes take hot water from the engines heat exchanger (radiator) system, and sends it to the water heater at the back of the boat to heat the domestic tap water.
After (Not working)
The manual for the water heater say’s it’s intake should be lower than the takeoff point at the engine, well it’s not, and other then a complete boat redesign with the engine being installed another foot higher, it’s not going to change. So although the plumbing went well, there’s a problem, I think with an airlock in the system. I spent ages trying to sort this, mostly by pulling pipes off at various points and waiting for water to arrive, usually hot, full of chemicals and squirting all over my hands arms and legs. I thought I had it all working when I got the hot water to go through the calorifier, but it doesn’t flow back to the engine. The sun set and I decided to leave this for tomorrow, once this is done, I can stow everything back in the stern and get onto the deck leak jobs, I have 3 days to fix a small leak on the main cabin hatch, and to see what I can do with two chainplates that are damp inside.
It’s Chinese new year, and it’s my year, the salty dog (Actually the Earth Dog 1958), I did hope this might get me a discount in the chinese restaurants, but I doubt it.
There’s no shortage of red lanterns in town, and a big bash is planned for next week here in Labuan.
Paul Collister.