Month: May 2017

We are hauled, and awaiting repair.

Not long after we anchored the sun set and the fishnets we anchored off moved a lot closer. I have noticed this before, at night hazards always seem to move closer, not sure if this is an optical or psychological effect, either way, it’s a pain, we moved very close to the nets, and I made a good note of where we are by taking transits around the area, that basically means lining up the edges of the net with something on the land, and making sure they stay lined up. Of course, a few hours later the tide turned, we swung and ended up even closer to the nets, which was odd as I thought we should have gone further away. I told Kathy we might need to re anchor, but I sat on the bowsprit for 20 minutes, enjoying the fading light and watching my transits, only to decide we were safe. After a lovely pasta & pesto dinner, I went to sleep in the cockpit, waking every hour or so to check my transits, until at 3am, when the tide swung us again, back to roughly were we started, then I slept through to sunrise.

Looking over to the yard, I could just make out the route in, but it looked shallow, sticks in the mud showed the way and later I watched a motor boat make its way in which gave me a boost.

The nets looked amazing in the morning sun, they are all different coloured 5 gallon plastic containers, large jerry can size.

These drums above on the right are spares I think, they were about 40ft to our stern. This is what you can see from space, credit to google earth.

So just 30 minutes before high water we headed in, Kathy called out the depth. We started with a metre more than when we went aground, so I was optimistic, however we soon hit 2 metres, but were still going, we should be aground at 2 metres, but I added a little into the calibration of the meter to help, but when we reached 1.8 I was wondering how we were still going forward, whatever was under us must have been very soft, so I upped the revs, and we raced in, I figured if I was going aground I wanted to plough through, into the deeper water in the boatyard. It quickly went back to 2 metres and stayed around that for the short trip to tie up alongside in front of the travel lift.

Once tied up, the first of several disappointments arrived, I was told the travel lift is to small to take us in the normal way, so I had to drop the backstay, remove the wind generator and reverse into the travel lift. I didn’t want to do the backstay as it’s going to be difficult to get it back together without loosening the forestays, which means taking the headsails off and removing the furling drum.  I will have to think of a cunning plan, probably involving rope and pulleys.

I managed to keep the wind generator on, the problem would come later once we were on land, then the travel lift wouldn’t be able to escape without decapitating the turbine, and that’s normally my job, using a fishing rod or forehead. To turn the boat around, a man was dispatched into the water to push it around, A dinghy might have been better, but who am I to judge.

The next blow was that rather than change the bearing and launch in the morning, I was told that they couldn’t start today as planned, as they had to do another boat in an emergency, and that tomorrow is national holiday, but they could start on Thursday. So the earliest we can launch will be Friday, I expect it will end up being Saturday. The tides are good until next Monday, after that we can’t get our for another week or more.

I was able to see that some more rubber had worked it’s way out of the cutless bearing, you can see a strip of it here, I have pulled it out to see better, but it didn’t take any effort, so I’m assuming it’s a bit of a mess inside the bearing.
I removed the blades and vane off the turbine so they can get the travel lift away, then I set about doing the job myself, I thought perhaps I could get the prop off, and pull the prop shaft, making it easier for them, I’m still going to be paying them, whoever does the work, but at least this way I might get away earlier. The prop came off no problem, but the PSS dripless shaft seal won’t come off. This is a device that stops the water getting into the boat through the tube that the prop shaft goes out of the boat through. It seems that the LBM engineer, who was the last one near it, had stripped one of the 2 allen grub screws that holds it in place. This is a tiny grub screw made of 316 stainless steel, inside a block of 316 stainless steel, in the bottom of the boat in a most inaccessible place.I’m at the point of drilling it out, but that might damage the seal, and I might end up having to wait a few weeks to get a replacement shipped in, so I’m going to wait until the yard’s engineer turns up, and get him to sort it. Good engineers know how to sort these things. I once had a similar problem on the baba 30 which required me to cut the prop shaft in half to get the job done, I really don’t want to go down that road again.

I forgot to add this AIS chart yesterday, you can see us as the little boat with the white dot, down in the middle, working our way east and edging across the channel getting ready to hang a left up to the eastern buoy and back into Malaysian waters. You can see it’s busy, each triangle is a boat, mostly big tankers or container ships, doing between 5 and 20 knots.

As it’s a holiday tomorrow, Kathy and I will pop into Johor Bahru and check it out, it’s supposed to be a bit of a party town, so I better get my John Travolta suit out, just in case we go dancing 😉

Paul Collister

 

Now if that isn’t clickbait, I don’t know what is.

So we arrived safely, at the entrance to Dalac Marina, We have to wait for high tide in the morning to get in, we went ashore earlier, well the boat did, we stayed onboard. We were looking for somewhere to anchor outside the boatyard. It’s a bit scraggy here, lots of rubbish in the water, we are kind of out of the way, tucked behind the docks, and opposite a big Singapore port, but the charts don’t cover this stretch, other than to say it’s all mud. When we arrived, we went right past the spot we are supposed to anchor in. All along the coast here for a few miles are fish farms, not a type I’m familiar with, they seem to be laid out in an S shape but with scores of bends. See pics below.

We found a gap, about 100m wide between two sets of nets that leads to the boatyard. We approached slowly as we are only a couple of hours after low water. The prospect looked great, the chart plotter said we were in 1-2m of water, but the depth gauge said 14m. the depth dropped steadily and Kathy called out each 1/2 metre drop every 30 seconds or so. When we got to about 5 meters I put her into astern to stop her as that would be fine, however, we went from 5 to 3 to 2.5 to 2 and aground as quick as Kathy could read them off, It wasn’t a problem, and I managed to reverse back after a few thrusts with the engine, and we anchored in 8 metres. It’s all mud here, perhaps a bicycle or two, but we’ve taken on Thai Granite rocks and survived, so there Mr Mud!

As to the police bit, yes that was a touch embarrassing, to get from One side of the causeway that links Malaysia to Singapore you have to almost completely circumnavigate Singapore, it’s a bit like if they had built a causeway/low bridge from Gosport to Ryde on the Isle of Wight, boats would have to go all around the island to get from Portsmouth to Southampton. I realise that means nothing to many of our readers.
Anyway, the Singaporeans won’t let boats into there waters unless you are visiting and check in with an agent and all that entails, they have police patrolling the island in varying sizes of patrol boats from 30 fast launches, through 60 foot very fast motor boats, right up to Navy Destroyers and frigates. We got the middle size one. Add to this annoyance, there is a traffic separation zone all around the bottom of the island, which is a bit like a motorway, central reservation included, The separation zone ensures traffic heading west is in the lane near to Singapore, we were going East, so we have to be on the other side. This means crossing the separation lane, very much in the way someone on a pushbike might cross a busy motorway, very carefully. There is a little bit in the middle you can be safe in. The lane is about a mile wide. Once across, then we flow with the big ships steaming up from behind us for 30 odd miles, then do the frogger game imitation again and cross back to the other side. Now in most places I have sailed, small boats like me sneak along the outside of the separation zone, on either side, and nobody cares, but that puts me in Singapore’s waters, but I gave it a try. I got about 3 miles along when I accidentally strayed , just a tiny little bit into the traffic zone, it was quite safe because the big boats in the lane all go on the other edge as it’s more direct. I was only there for a couple of minutes before I noticed and quickly turned to head back to the inshore bit, but too late. Screaming towards me with spary gushing from either side of his bow was a Singapore police launch. They looked very much like they were going to escort us back to the nick, as one of them started organising ropes on the side the where they were approaching us. By now I was out of the lane, still no other traffic around so no harm done, but I was told in no uncertain terms, but in a very friendly manner that I could not do my journey in their waters and I must cross the separation zone to the Indonesian side to continue. I also got told off for having my AIS off, which surprised me as I was using it loads. I asked ever so nicely if I could motor through the anchorage ahead then cross the zone there, which would save me an hour, they agreed, but followed me all the way, and shadowed me across the separation zone.  I suppose it’s a bit like driving up the hard shoulder between a couple of junctions on a motorway, but being on the wrong side, and doing it in full view of the police.
I checked the AIS and found I had disabled the transmitter, yes that was right, I had assumed it defaulted to on after a power down, but no, I turned it back on, and a few minutes later the police launch screamed up to us again, just to tell us they had us on AIS and all was ok. Which was nice of them. Once across the zone, we were in Indonesian waters, and they don’t go there. But later we had to make a load more detours just to keep away from their coast. Seems a bit over the top to me.

 

The Johor Strait, which is were we spent all afternoon is full of shipyards and old ships, ferry ports and docks. Very busy really, but some parts had lovely beaches. I’m sure Kathy will have more in her post.

We left this morning at 6:50, just as the sun rose, and just a few hours before my replacement wind generator blade arrived. That’s a good game to play when cruising, “What’s my postal address”.
We arrived and dropped anchor just as the sun set at 7:10.

Paul Collister

Yes, our time lazing around in Puteri harbour marina is up and we head off to the boatyard tomorrow.  I’m hoping to leave at about 06:30 as it’s a good 10 hours+ and I’m planning to pick up some fuel on the way from a barge moored in a river. It’s going to be an interesting passage, we could save an hour or more if we pass south of two little islands, but I have been told we will be in trouble and chased away by the Singapore marine police, so we have to go to the north of them which adds a few miles. We will be motoring through one of the worlds busiest ports, looking at the chart it looks mad, millions of buoys, loads of no entry areas, and exclusion zones. and there will be scores of ships motoring through a hundred odd ships at anchor. It’s good Kathy will be here to help, she can steer while I stare at all the AIS targets on my MacBook, trying to work out which one is which, and is it heading our way. The worst of it should last for about 5 hours.
We will anchor outside the entrance to the yard tomorrow night and wait for the high tide in the morning before we can get in. That should be fun, we need to anchor in-between two fish farms. It’s a very rough looking yard, and we are living on the boat for one, maybe more nights, so out with the DEET (mossie spray), I don’t expect they have much in the way of toilets or showers, so it will be a relief to be back in the water later in the week.
I have been looking into the route to America from here and we will probably not go this year. Lots of reasons, but mainly it’s unlikely we will do this passage again, so I want to do it justice. To get to Japan missing the cyclones, we would have to race there, missing Taiwan, Japan would be rushed, Theres a port in Russia, north of Japan, that I hear is well worth a visit and I have heard Alaska is an amazing place, worth a year or two of cruising. Coming down from Alaska, I would love to spend a lot of time exploring the inner passage around Vancouver Island. All of these places would get crammed into a few weeks, plus the fact that we want to be home for all of September makes me think It’s just too much of a rush.
So I have put our next port of call as Tioman, a beautiful Island about 150 miles north of us, on the eastern side of Malaysia, as our next port of call.
We will spend about 5 days slowly making our way there, it would have been on our route to Japan, so if I revert back to the Japan plan, we don’t lose anything, but I expect by the time we have had a few days there we will have worked out some more destinations. We have a lot of options, which is nice, Staying in the gulf of Thailand is possibly and should provide good sailing during the SW Monsoon season, we can visit Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. Or we can hop over to Eastern Malaysia on the island of Borneo, popping into The Kingdom of Bruni, or going to the rain forest music festival in Sarawak. We could head don to Indonesia and travel along those islands heading towards Austrailia. We shall have to see.

Our friends cat came to say goodbye yesterday, they have headed off to Tioman as part of the ‘Sailing east’ Malaysian rally, I expect we will bump into them later.
A lot of people use these air berths for their power boats, I think it’s because the warm waters cause growth under the boat to be accelerated. but they look strange. A small pump fills the big tanks with air to raise the berth, or the tanks are filed with water to lower it.

Here the boat has been driven into a submerged berth that has then been partly inflated

It looks like they have invented some kind of boat launcher

Fully inflated.

Paul Collister.

At midday on Friday 28th April I left my flat in Liverpool after a great month spent with friends and family in Liverpool, Wirral, Swindon and Milan to begin the journey back to Malaysia. From Lime Street I caught a train to Manchester Airport for my connecting flight to London. Luckily (for me at least) it wasn’t too hot and sticky a day because I was pulling a suitcase weighing 22kg, containing not only the usual clothes and toiletries, but also several items Paul needed for the boat and a fair few food items, including packets of vegan cheese and jars of peanut butter.  It was a relief to check it in at Manchester where I wouldn’t see it again until it was time to collect it from Kuala Lumpur Airport the following day.  It was late afternoon local time on Saturday 29th April when Paul met me after a 12 hour flight from Heathrow. My body clock was still on British time where it was mid-morning, and I hadn’t slept much on the plane so it was disorienting to say the least, especially when we went for dinner when I’d not long had breakfast on the plane! Still it felt good to be back ‘home’ and to see Paul again. I had been looking forward to being back on board Sister Midnight and seeing her new berth right on the southern tip of Peninsular Malaysia. There was one more flight to do before that, however. From KL we had to fly to Johor Bahru, a journey of about 45 minutes, but this flight was delayed for an hour and was followed by a 30 minute taxi ride from the airport to the marina, so it wasn’t until the early hours of Sunday morning that my journey back to SE Asia came to an end.  Walking along the pontoons in the dark I felt the residue of the day’s heat and it struck me that the journey had taken me from the comfort of a hot water bottle and heavy duvet at night in England and brought me instead to the relief of cooling fans and cold showers. Paul had added another fan to the boat in my absence which is set up to rotate above us like a ceiling fan to circulate the air more effectively.

I hadn’t been able to see much of my surroundings the night before, and when I woke up I almost expected to see the familiar sight of Langkawi’s Royal Yacht Club from the last time I’d woken up on the boat.  Talking to Paul and reading his blog posts about Puteri (pronounced Pootree) I was prepared to be unimpressed because he’d been fairly noncommittal in his descriptions. It had looked pretty enough all lit up in the darkness, and the short walk through the marina reception had revealed a clean, newish building leading out to a courtyard with bars, palm trees and benches overlooking the harbour. From the cockpit, viewing it all in the light of day, I was pleasantly surprised to see a hive of activity in the marina complex and resort. Music was playing from a stage on the second storey of a shopping mall where activities for children were in full swing by the sound of it. The marina was full of people who would be taking part in the Sail Malaysia ‘Passage to the East’ Rally the following week, and the associated festivities had culminated on Saturday night with a jazz festival (I wasn’t too disappointed to have missed that ;)). It was a bank holiday weekend here in Malaysia too so visitors had come to stroll around the complex and have their photos taken against the harbour background.  The semicircle of land around the public marina is taken up with attractive blocks of serviced apartments and a huge hotel, the marina clubhouse with its services and facilities (including a library), and several smart-looking bars, coffee shops and restaurants.

The floor above, accessed by an escalator, is signposted as a shopping boulevard.  I saw all this as we took a walk around so that I could get my bearings. Paul was right to state that the shops aren’t much to get excited about. They are mostly retail outlets for designer brands and a string of shops and stalls selling children’s toys, clothes and sweets. Quite a few units in the mall are still waiting to be sold. Hello Kitty is very popular here – there is a ‘land’ devoted to her somewhere close by and the hotel offers trips to nearby Legoland. The convenience store on the ground floor sells plenty of chocolate, crisps, and fizzy drinks but little else. Still the atmosphere was good and everywhere is very clean and well maintained. It’s a fairly new resort so it’s still being developed but it seems to be a popular destination for daytrippers at weekends and holidays already. Staff, especially the gate guards, are very friendly according to Paul. They are employed to let marina patrons in and out of the pontoons, but they also spend a lot of time blowing whistles to tell people not to stand on the marina walls. It’s a long drop down into the murky water but it’s a popular place to pose for photos and naturally, children can’t resist climbing them even though there’s a play area right next to them.

It was too hot to linger outside for long – it will take me a while to become reacclimatised to the heat and humidity I expect. It feels a lot more humid here than it did in Langkawi, but it is the height of summer and we’re that bit closer to the equator. Most of Sunday was spent unpacking and sleeping off more of the jet lag. Early in the evening we went to a shop inside the ferry terminal which is a short walk from the marina, to get some bread. Thunder was crashing around us and it had grown very dark. Paul told me storms are frequent here but they are over quite quickly. There were some interesting sculptures made out of bamboo in the green areas next to the path, and a quirky swing that I was keen to have a go on but it was full of people and we needed to get back to the boat before the rain fell. I did get to go on it a few days later though as the pic below shows (it looks better than it actually was).

On Monday I still felt very lethargic and only felt up to doing a bit more unpacking, looking up information relating to Singapore and Raffles Hotel on the internet, and lounging by the fans dozing or reading. In the evening we went for dinner in one of the waterside restaurants called The Olive Kitchen, although it specialised in Indian cuisine with not an olive in sight. TV screens were showing music videos featuring songs from The Eagles, Pink Floyd and The Bee Gees. Paul wasn’t impressed but I loved it, and the food was good too. Back on the boat I packed a small bag ready for our visit to Singapore, the third and smallest South East Asian country on our journey so far.

 

You can probably tell from the title, this post isn’t going to be a bundle of laughs, but I just managed to upload these pics, my iPhone wouldn’t hand them over yesterday until I rebooted my mac, an iPhotos problem I expect.

If you look closely you can see the one above has some rubber on the edge, and is noticeably thinner at that point. The other end is fine, so I suspect there was a manufacturing problem at some point with this one. I’m going to use the other one and keep this one as a spare.

It does make me wonder about the provenance of this, it’s marked as being made by MORSE in the USA, and has a morse part number on it, but the quality and finish seem a bit rough and ready compared with the countrose one I bought in the UK.
So could this be a ‘knock off’ cheap Asian counterfeit, or possibly as is more and more common, Morse now subcontract the production of their bearings to an Asian company. I would think it’s come from the same source as the one it is replacing, also bought and fitted in Malaysia a year ago, so I’m no worse off. I will have a look at them when we reach the shores of North America and ‘compare and contrast’

Other techie news, I bought a new PSU for the macbook air and that’s solved my charging problems, Apple now have another £60 to hide away somewhere offshore 😉 but I’m made up, what with a brand new replacement iPhone that charges quickly and takes brilliant pics, I’m feeling properly tooled up (IT wise) again. However WhatsApp is weird with new phones, and deleted all my history, which is a pain.

We have just had a load of fighter jets fly over us, the Singapore military have a base directly over the Johor strait from us, less than a mile, and every few days they make their presence felt with an air display, or a display of firepower.

Paul Collister

We are just back from a couple of days in Singapore. I had originally wanted to take the boat there, but it turns out to be very expensive to keep a boat there, it’s also difficult from a paperwork point of view, you have to go to a certain place in the straits, and anchor and wait for a customs/immigration guy to visit and check your papers, then you can proceed to a marina, where you have to appoint an agent to make your application to stay and clear you in. You need an agent to clear you out as well.
However, you don’t need to go through all the border crossing by road hassle in order to do a bit of shopping. We had to leave Malaysia on Tuesday morning, and check in and get a visa for Singapore, then do the same on the reverse. I wonder if the UK will have to go through this rigmarole when we brexit, it’s certainly looking bad, I guess it’s ok if like a lot of people in the UK who don’t travel much, but I would hate it. On the way over we used busses, you first get in a queue to leave MY you get a bus over the bridge, a short ride, get off the bus, get in a queue to enter SG, get in a queue to get a bus to the Metro. It took us about an hour for that bit, sometimes it can take 3 hours if it’s a public holiday or rush hour. We took a taxi back, that was much quicker as they stamp your passport at the toll booth and you stay in the car. The Metro in SG is brilliant, new, clean, quiet, frequent, very cheap, for £7 we got a card that covers all busses and metro for 2 days. 

I headed off to the chandlers to pick up the bearings I had ordered, passing this temple above, which like the chandlers, is in Little India. Sadly despite the fact I had a text msg from the chandler (aqua) saying he had 2 in stock and would be happy to sell them to me on Tuesday, he seemed to know nothing about it and didn’t have any! He said he could get them for tomorrow but I had to pay in full up front. I explained that I wouldn’t, as he had proved to be useless so far, and I wouldn’t risk it, he said they were in his warehouse and he would bring them early, but must be paid first. I pointed out there was little chance of me not turning up, and should I be struck by lightning, he could just take them back to the warehouse. I think that I might have said the wrong thing, because he then got upset and deplored me not to talk bout being struck by lightning, that it wont happen, and I mustn’t say that, he was genuinely concerned for me, which was nice. There’s a lot of superstition out here. Anyway, I found another chandler, MarineTech, just around the corner, that had a nice lady running the show and a deal was done for her to get the bearings, for a much better price for the morning. I also spent a load more there too, stocked up on varnish now. She had a liferaft for just £750, which is about what I am thinking of paying in postage to get a decent one shipped here. This one is made in China, I explained to her, in my most diplomatic way, what with her being Chinese ethnicity, that I had heard some unfavourable comments about Chinese liferafts, she had heard them too, but was keen to point out that she had sold loads, and had no complaints. But isn’t that the way with liferafts? I have a picture below, I think attention to detail is important in this area, so not checking the spelling of fiferatws is disappointing to say the least. 

Disappointed as I was to end up on top of a rock  a few weeks back, that’s nothing to how the skipper of the ship below must have felt we he hit these three skyscrapers.

Below is a very sacred buddhist temple, a fragment of the Buddha’s tooth is here, we didn’t see it, and frankly, I don’t remember teeth being that big a deal in any of the buddhist teachings I read, but all the same, I thought the temple very beautiful and I’m very pleased to have been able to visit.

In many ways, the towns we have visited have architectural similarities, brought on by necessity, the shop houses , where the shop is on the ground floor and the living quarters above, make sense for a small business, the covered raised walkways are perfect for a place where it can chuck it down at any time, and the roads can turn to rivers, and they also provide a great shade from the hot sun the rest of the time. On top of that, the shops can conduct their business outdoors where it is cooler.

So Tuesday night, and we had a lovely walk around town, it’s a very pretty place downtown by the river at night. Kathy has pictures, I can’t find mine. It’s like a mini manhattan, but all the high rise are clumped together, making it feel quite open.

Wednesday morning, I picked up the bearings, and bought lots of hose/pipe and stuff, I found a shop selling a TDS meter, but it turns out I have no chance of buying a membrane for the watermaker here. They have to be shipped from the USA. but I have everything except the membrane, and I have membrane cleaner, so I’m going to give it a go. I’m hoping I should be able to make water, but at a reduced rate. The TDS meter measures the salinity, and the purity of the water, so that will be useful.

Now I went to an area called Sim Lim, where there is Sim Lim Sq and Sim Lim Tower. I may write a separate entry on this, or even start a new blog devoted to them, but I was amazed, It was lie going back in time, floor after floor after floor of myriads of shops within a maze of corridors, and every shop selling stuff that cannot be bought in shops in England anymore, Im taking everything from resistors, capacitors, switches, cables, all the Maplin/Radioshack type of things but add on top of that, everything you need to build a recording studio, or a radio telescope, or a 3d printer or . . . the list goes on, I left Kathy in a cafe where she was falling asleep with Jetlag, and I wandered for a good hour. Here’s a shop that sold connecters 

Some speakers or cones

Reluctantly I had to leave, but Kathy was pleased, especially as the next port of call was to be Raffles, for a famous Singapore sling. Kathy seemed to like it there, I suspect she might mention it in her blog.

And here is the said Singapore Sling in the raffles bar /  snooker room.

Lazy day tomorrow as we watch the marina empty of the yachts, they are all heading off on a rally “Sail Malaysia, Passage East”, we might end up following and meeting them on our way north.

Paul Collister.