Pre-emptive strike

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.