Upon arrival at Sea World we had no small bills to pay our drivers. With repeated thanks, we handed over twice the expected amount, leaving two confused but happy looking men in our dust as we ran between the palm trees, frantic, to the beach.
And there she was. Green Ghost was right there, right where we’d left her. Well, not quite where we’d left her. There were two dinghies alongside our boat, a woman in each one. There were three men on the foredeck. We slid our dinghy into the water and zotted out to the Ghost to find the crews of Gryphon II and Amaryllis on board, concluding the reanchoring exercise.
It was true. Hantu Ijau had made a bid for freedom while we dined out on chicken. Amazy. That had never happened before. How lucky we were that our neighbours had noticed and sprang into action when they realized Green Ghost was adrift. She was half a mile out to sea by the time her rescuers scrambled on board. Without our good neighbours, Green Ghost could’ve disappeared over the horizon, taking everything we owned with her.
The island of Flores had been a delight and Labuan Bajo on the western coast was as gorgeous as the rest of it. Wheat-coloured golden hills dotted with dark green trees met a sea of unparalleled clarity. From a distance, it was beautiful but sadly, as in so many other places, there was an endless stream of plastic refuse drifting by our hull in the anchorage. The shoreline was equally polluted with plastics piled high at the tide line. World-class scuba diving and the famous Komodo dragons bring many tourists to Labuan Bajo, resulting in a slightly more upscale vibe in town. Great pizza served to diners lounging in a bean-bag-strewn loft provided a decidedly western bar experience, but the littered shore, goats tethered to sticks, and roaming roosters left us in no doubt that we were still in Indonesia.
As good as the cold beer and hot pizza was it wasn’t the onshore tourist scene that impressed us – it was Komodo National Park. From the ranger-guided walks among the dragons, to the scuba diving in sapphire waters with manta rays, dugong, whitetip reef sharks, and fabulous coral reefs, we were impressed by each adventure.
Certain places were a vacation from the cruising life and Komodo had been one of them. Not having to make miles every day, we’d idly moved from one lovely anchorage to the next. Spending a week in the remote outer islands, we enjoyed impromptu cocktail parties on pink sand beaches, we snorkelled through massive schools of fish that darted about like a subaqueous murmuration of starlings, we hiked up arid headlands where our views took in manta rays gliding through the crystal-clear waters below. Each day we were delighted with some natural wonder – Komodo was a remarkable place. With no signal on our cell phone we were completely off the grid. Even for cruisers who seem so disconnected from the real world already, these small escapes from the distraction of the digital world were a welcome retreat.
In early September, we set sail for an overnight trip to skip across the north shore of the island of Sumbawa and head straight to the island of Lombok where we had some sea-to-sky adventures planned. Nik wanted to surf at Ekas Bay and I was interested in climbing Mount Rinjani, at least as far as the crater lakes, if not to the summit itself. On our first day out, we sailed past the shipbuilding village of Wepa and within range of the village’s cell phone tower. Nik used our iPhone as a hot spot and e-mails from the past week piled up in our inbox.
In preparation for night watches I was having a mid-morning sleep on the settee when Nik woke me.
“Jenn,” he said. “My dad died.”
We had to get home.
CHAPTER 20
Kalimantan, Singapore, and Malacca
(October – November 2011)
Vladimir Nikolajevich passed away at the age of ninety-three. His death was sudden and unexpected. Vlad Daddy-O, as we liked to call him, had few health issues. From his seniors’ residence, he was admitted to hospital on a Friday afternoon with a diagnosis of pneumonia. Three days later he died. Out of cell phone range in Komodo National Park, we didn’t even know he was ill. As we sailed past the cell phone tower in Wepa, Sumbawa, we got the news of his passing within six hours of his death.
We knew what we had to do. Our first priority was to find somewhere safe to leave the boat. We made a series of quick decisions. There would be no surfing at Ekas, no views from Mount Rinjani. Instead of our overnight sail to Lombok, we sailed on, continuing west for fifty hours, heading for Bali with heavy hearts. Each time we passed a cell phone tower we were able to make a few more arrangements. The Sail Indonesia Rally organizers assisted us by booking a berth at the Bali Marina and ensuring that our visas would allow a re-entry into Indonesia. Our niece, a travel agent, looked into flights and began planning a memorial service.
On that first night at sea after learning of Vlad’s passing I sat alone in the cockpit on my watch. Memories of my father-in-law filled my mind. I pictured his hands in his habit of repeatedly successively tapping each fingertip to his thumb. I could hear his sing-song voice declaring, “I am a doctor!” Like his hands, his mind was always in motion, his head often bent in concentration over the latest medical journal. Yet his intellect was an enigma; while he’d delivered hundreds of babies in his long career as a GP, he was entirely useless in the kitchen. Unable to feed himself he was known to beg, “Jenny! Make me the coffee!” I smiled when I thought of his advice. “Kids” (he always called us), “take care of your mother and always remember to have fun.” When the swoop of a shadow flew through my peripheral vision, I looked up to see a seabird circling the boat in the dark. You found us, I thought. We will, I promise you, I answered him. I had the overwhelming sense that Vlad’s spirit had circled the earth to find us.
It was a long, convoluted trip home: fifty hours of sailing to get to Bali, a two-day wait for a berth at the marina, a flight from Bali to Singapore, then a twenty-four-hour layover, a flight to Seoul, another to San Francisco, a nine-hour layover, and finally a red-eye flight to Toronto. My sister met us at the airport at 5:30 a.m. with two Tim Hortons coffees in the cup holders of her minivan.
The memorial service was a cheerful tribute to Vlad’s life and an uplifting experience for my mother-in-law, Olga, which was what we’d hoped it would be. As we walked the three blocks from the funeral home, pushing Olga in her wheelchair before us, we saw a commotion outside the entrance to the seniors’ residence. Again, a bird. Drivers were impatiently sounding their horns at a beautiful swan standing in the middle of the road. The swan stopped traffic in both directions until we got Olga settled back in her room. When the three of us peered out her window onto the street below, the swan flew off, perhaps content that we were together and Olga was safely home.
But Nik was distraught at the loss of his father and full of regret for not being there when his dad had needed him most. Our short stay in Canada distressed him too. It was a difficult goodbye, leaving his mother, Olga, alone in the seniors’ residence, grieving her husband of over fifty years.
We arrived back at the Bali Marina to find Green Ghost dirty but otherwise fine. Shell-shocked by the previous two and a half weeks, it was hard to get back into the swing of things. There was jet lag of course, as well as a surprising difficulty in readjusting to the heat and humidity, but mostly we were suffering from depressed spirits. It’s not easy losing a parent. We didn’t feel like having fun and we didn’t feel like hearing other people tell us about all the fun they’d been having either.
We had a tough time wrapping our minds around what was next. Stopping on a dime and disengaging from cruising was challenging, but re-engaging was harder. You can’t parachute back in to where you left off. It doesn’t work that way. Nearly every other boat we knew had moved on. The deadline on our Indonesian cruising permit stared back at us. As the crow flies, we were a thousand miles from Singapore. Once again, we were at the back of the pack feeling like we needed to catch up. Rather than pursue touristy things in Bali, three days after getting back, we left the marina to head north and west.
We set out at noon for a twenty-two-hour sail to Lovina on the north coast of Bali where we stopp
ed for thirty hours. From Lovina we did a fifteen-hour overnight trip to the island of Raas, just off Java. We enjoyed a twenty-hour rest stop there then embarked on a twenty-eight-hour sail to the island of Bawean where we had a sixteen-hour rest stop at anchor, rising at four a.m. to sail thirty-six hours to Kalimantan, the Indonesian state on the island of Borneo.
Being jet-lagged at the outset was no hindrance. Our state of exhaustion probably helped. There were so many days of disrupted sleep patterns, it was easy to sleep on the off watch no matter the time of day or night. Even so, it was a demanding stretch.
As Green Ghost weaved between the dozens of sailboats anchored off the town of Kumai looking for a spot to anchor, our recognizable dark green hull invited many calls of sympathy over our VHF radio. We were buoyed up and moved by the care and kindness of all our fellow cruisers. It felt good to be back in our neighbourhood. We were home.
We were soon enthralled by another experience – a two-day one-night journey up the Sekonyer River to the orangutan sanctuary (“Camp Leakey”) in Tanjung Puting National Park.
For a change, we were not in control of the vessel. All we had to do was sit back and be taken on a magical ride, putt-putting along in a klotok, a traditional wooden shallow-draft riverboat. We sat in chairs on the breezy upper deck while the captain, his wife, and their small boy remained on the lower deck tending to the vessel’s navigation and our needs. Our guide, Kres, a handsome and charismatic young Indonesian man who spoke excellent English, hovered between the two decks, sometimes sitting to chat with us, sometimes serving meals, and never missing an opportunity to point out a kingfisher among the low branches at the shoreline or a monkey high in the trees. Upriver, the orangutans were impressive and the other wildlife was equally entertaining; proboscis monkeys, long-tailed macaques, red monkeys, and tropical birds delighted us.
Kres was light-hearted and fun, but he took his job very seriously, whispering gentle reprimands if we did too much chatting and not enough watching the wildlife. He was passionate about the natural world and the experience in the moment. He charmed me by referring to me as Princess Jennifer but he endlessly teased Nik, finding all his picture-taking and videotaping a bit much. Nik was forever adding voice-over narration in a very serious tone while he shot footage. This made Kres laugh – he didn’t see the next David Atten-borough, he saw some white guy talking endlessly into his microphone. While I enjoyed a royal title, Kres referred to Nik as Mr. Blah-blah-blah.
Most of the fleet congregated in Belitung for the Sail Indonesia Rally Closing Ceremony and Gala Dinner in mid-October. Our experience in Indonesia had been enhanced one hundred-fold by having been a part of it.
From Belitung, all the boats fanned out according to their northern destinations. Whether headed for Danga Bay or Puteri Harbour in Malaysia, or to one of the marinas available in Singapore, we were all in the final few hundred miles.
From Bangksa to Lingga, we sailed in a shrinking flotilla, as other boats went their way. On our final night in Indonesia, we anchored off the tiny island of Kentar with only three other boats, remarkably all Canadian. Green Ghost was back in the northern hemisphere for the first time in a decade. We were ready to wave wonderful Indonesia goodbye, to cross the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and to pounce on the first-world delights of Singapore.
In the Customs and Immigration basin we made contact by radio. The customs boat pulled alongside and held a fish net across the gap between us. We giggled as we placed our passports and boat paperwork in it, it seemed so unofficial. The officer hauled it in, taking our papers inside the vessel. We hovered in the basin. They hovered in the basin. Questions were answered over the VHF. Once cleared in, our paperwork was handed back to us in the fish net and we were free to enter the country. It was a no-nonsense neat and tidy process, just like the island country itself.
We pulled into the luxurious Oneo15 Marina in Sentosa Cove, Singapore, so called for its position at one degree and fifteen minutes of latitude north of the equator. Friends who had stayed there years earlier had told us it was a don’t-miss location, so we’d booked ourselves a three-week stay believing they were right. With its beautiful modern docks, infinity pool, weight room, and air-conditioned Internet lounge complete with coffee bar and barista ready to serve up a latte, we’d landed in the lap of luxury. It felt like a different planet compared to the relative poverty of Indonesia just a day’s sail to the south.
During our first week in Singapore we were sightseeing by day and not sleeping at night. At the dock, in the confined marina basin there was no breeze. It was impossibly hot. We didn’t want the expense or complication of figuring out how to air-condition our boat, but two weeks in, exhausted and cranky from our sticky restless nights, we caved. We bought a portable household unit, measured carefully to ensure it would store in a hanging locker when at sea or at anchor. It saved us – an air conditioner was the only way to tolerate a live-aboard life in Singapore.
In mid-November, we departed northbound up the Straits of Malacca to cruise the Malaysian peninsula’s west coast en route to Phuket, Thailand, for Christmas.
Since arriving in equatorial waters we’d been experiencing thunderstorms, intense tropical downpours accompanied by plenty of lightning nearly every afternoon. Singapore has one of the highest rates of lightning activity in the world and daily light shows persisted as we rounded the corner to transit the strait between the Indonesian island of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, dodging great rafts of garbage on our route. Sadly, the area appeared to have one of the highest pollution levels as well – it was the most garbage-strewn stretch of water we’d ever seen.
The usual atmospheric rumblings were going on when we pulled into the Admiral Marina in Port Dickson, about 170 NM north of Singapore. Being among the forest of masts in the marina made Nik nervous. Were we better off isolated at anchor somewhere or being one of many metal objects sticking up into the electrically charged sky? It was tough to say.
“Give me your laptop,” Nik said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to put it in the oven before we head up to the bar.”
“A Faraday cage?” I asked, thinking back to my university physics courses.
“Yeah,” he responded. “It might work. If the boat got struck by lightning, the stainless steel stove would conduct the current around the outside of the oven and prevent the current from passing through the interior, wouldn’t it?” He busily filled our tiny oven with his laptop, my laptop, and the GPS chartplotter from the binnacle. Then looking at me smugly, with his finger in the air, suggesting even more great ideas, he grabbed the HF radio and the mic, the handheld VHF and the handheld GPS and stuffed them in as well. “In for a penny, in for the rest,” he said.
“A pound,” I came back.
“What?”
“A pound,” I said. “In for a penny in for a pound.”
“Whatever,” he said, his usual retort.
It was hot as Hades in the late afternoon. We sealed up the boat to the pending storm then dashed up the dock before the rain began. It was easy to rationalize not cooking at home and treating ourselves to dinner in the air-conditioned bar while our air conditioner brought the temperature down on board.
We dined with Toni and Peter from the catamaran Tigger, friends we’d made in Singapore and with friends of theirs, Diane and Alan of Moonfleet. We shared information and stories, hearing of Tigger’s experience with a lightning strike near Borneo and laughing about the time we stood talking on the docks in Singapore, when we suddenly noticed that our hair was standing on end in the electrified air.
Our goal at Port Dickson was to arrange a short land trip to the city of Malacca, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, that had once been the capital of a Malay kingdom and was subsequently ruled by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. Taking a bus trip south to the city to stay in a bed and breakfast was a decadent little getaway from cruising – a few delicious nights off the boat. The Peranakan culture of the are
a was fascinating and the Chinese-Javanese-Sumatran fusion with the added European influences made for unique architecture and some unforgettable dining.
I enjoyed our break in Malacca but back at the boat in the swank Port Dickson marina I put on my accounting hat again. I was tallying up our expenses and voiced my concerns about our over-spending on marina fees and dinners out.
“We’ve got to get back out to anchor, and we’ve got to stop eating out,” I told the captain in my voice-of-reason tone.
“Yeah, I know,” he agreed.
At that very moment, there was a knock on the hull. It was Tigger telling us that a bunch of sailors were meeting for happy hour at the bar and we must come out to play.
“Sounds good, what time?” Nik asked. He never wanted to miss out on fun.
The following night I put my foot down. “Tonight, we’re eating in!” I said, as I pulled tomato sauce out of the freezer. I put water on to boil, pulled out the spaghetti, and turned on the oven to heat up some garlic bread.
A minute or two went by.
“What’s that smell?”
“What smell?” Nik replied.
“Ho-lee shit!” I gasped as I launched myself across the galley, turning the heat off and yanking open the oven door in one swift movement.
Tucked in four days earlier, our electronics were still inside, safe from electrical storms maybe, but certainly not safe from me.
CHAPTER 21
A Year in Asia
(November 2011 – September 2012)
Friends met us for Christmas in Thailand and the four of us cruised around Phang Nga Bay, enjoying the dramatic scenery of limestone karst towers in the blue-green sea and cave explorations ashore. Fortunately, we hadn’t had to replace our electronics. The cremation damage was minimal – a melted welt across the plastic cover of the chartplotter GPS and some slight damage to the cord for the HF radio mic (fixed with a little electrical tape).
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