By now, we had years of experience and yet we could still come up with new ways to make mistakes. Further use of our oven as a Faraday cage involved an added safety measure –removing all the knobs from the control panel when items were put inside.
Even though we were spared an expensive electrical refit, typical of most cruising sailors, the moment we found ourselves in an area of the world where getting boat work done was relatively easy, we pounced on the opportunity to make a couple of upgrades to Green Ghost. We’d seen the sailboat Dionysus sparkling in the sunshine in the anchorage at Krabi. After speaking with the owners, we learned of the massive refit they’d undertaken, including beautifully installed new teak decks.
It was the one thing Green Ghost had that we hadn’t wanted when we bought her: teak decks. We knew that someday we’d have to replace them, or tear the teak off and redo the decks in fibreglass. Our thirty-year-old decks were looking their age and we worried about the expense of replacement. But the yard that had done the work on Dionysus gave us a quote that was so reasonable, we couldn’t afford not to take advantage of it, so we settled in at the dock at Yacht Haven Marina for the many weeks of work that lay ahead.
We weren’t the only ones. For many, Phuket was the first stop since Trinidad, South America, or New Zealand, where major boat maintenance could be accomplished at a reasonable price. For circumnavigators, it was the last stop before the long Indian Ocean crossing – a good place to get things done.
There is a “while we’re at it” thing that happens when you begin a big project on a boat. We’re at the dock for a month anyway, so while we’re at it, let’s get davits made too. And since the deck is being removed, while we’re at it, let’s get new stanchion bases, and new deck cleats, and let’s change the location of the radar post. There are always a dozen smaller projects you can do while you’re at the big one.
On some boats, we saw this cause trouble when the male on board was ankle deep in power tools, tinkering with his toy – in some cases loving it, in other cases not, but doing it anyway. The female on board may have been up for the idea at first, but quickly became disenchanted, losing interest not just in the work at hand, but in the boat and the lifestyle, and finally in cruising itself. I wondered why more skippers didn’t see it coming. When you kill your partner with project fatigue you may kill the cruising dream too and find yourself alone on a smart-looking boat.
But in Thailand, lonely Caucasian men didn’t have too much trouble finding a first mate as Nik found out for himself.
In the new year, we’d run out of tonic, which was far worse than running out of gin. Gin you could buy cheaply anywhere, but tonic was expensive and harder to find. When we heard that tonic was available at a small grocery store on a resort property a short drive north, Nik rented a scooter.
At the destination, a lovely young Thai woman engaged him in conversation.
“You American?” she asked as he dismounted the motorbike.
“Canadian,” he answered.
“Oh, Canadian, very niice,” she replied with a high-pitched nasal twang on her English. “You live here?” she asked. Judging from Nik’s tan, it was a reasonable question.
“No, just visiting. I’m here on a boat,” he answered.
“Very niice,” she replied. “You want to meet Thai girl? Thai girl very niice.”
“Oh no, no thank you,” Nik replied, flattered. “I’m married.”
“You marry Thai girl?” she asked hopefully.
“No, no, I’m married to a Canadian girl,” he explained. “My wife sailed here with me.”
“Why you not marry Thai girl? Thai girl very niice!” she scolded him, disappointed in his choice of spouse.
He was still chuckling about it when he returned with the tonic and a slightly inflated ego – chuffed in part for being mistaken for an exotic expat, but more so for being approached by a gorgeous young Thai.
While the teak deck work carried on, we took inexpensive Air Asia flights to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia for some sightseeing and to renew our Thai visas. The boat could stay in Thailand a while, but we needed new stamps in our passports.
We were enjoying our time in Asia – the food, the culture, the inexpensive air travel to locations far from the boat. We were in no hurry to leave. It was the northeast monsoon season from November to February, and despite being considered the cool time of year and a good time for cruising in relatively dry conditions, we were glad to be at a dock and plugged into air conditioning. March would bring the wet southwest monsoon – a period of heavy storms beginning in April, lasting until October, and hitting the Andaman Coast of the southern peninsula harder than anywhere else in the country. Come March, it would be a good time to move from the western side of Southeast Asia toward the east, to cruise Malaysian Borneo.
Besides, we’d heard you could sail 40 NM up a river called the Kinabatangan on the northeast coast of Borneo. And we’d heard you might see elephants up that river – you might even have them swim right out in front of your boat and that was reason enough to go.
With our boat work completed we departed Yacht Haven Marina both pleased and displeased. I loved the teak work – we were looking like a mini mega yacht with our gorgeous new decks – but I was unimpressed with the davits that we’d added on our stern. Nik had always wanted an alternative to stowing the dinghy on the foredeck or towing it behind. He’d pined for davits for years. The stainless steel contraptions gave him a place to store his surf boards, thrilling him, but upsetting me by ruining the aesthetic line of the boat. With beautiful decks and ugly davits, we left Thailand and headed for Tioman Island on the southeast coast of Malaysia, reportedly the spot depicted as Bali Ha’i in the 1958 film South Pacific.
Southbound in Malacca Strait we made a stop in Kuah on the island of Langkawi. There wasn’t much to see in Kuah. It was a murky-water port busy with Malaysian tourists disembarking from the ferries that brought them from the mainland. Vacationers came to the duty-free island for the luxurious resorts and the pristine beaches located on the north shore. We came for the temple.
It was a short taxi ride out of town. Picture a post-apocalypse Costco full of alcohol. The place was massive – you could back a truck in through the front door. Despite the wide opening, it was dark inside the cavernous warehouse, dark and hot. Near the front was a large desk, piled with stacks of papers, some of which had toppled over, spilling onto the floor. On a decrepit wheelie chair sat the manager, a thin-haired Chinese man, bare-chested, pot-bellied, wearing only a pair of slippers and some dirty shorts. He sat hunched over and sweating, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, a long length of paper spooling from his adding machine and coiling at his feet. Not your average liquor store. Not your average cashier either.
Booze was piled everywhere – down every aisle there was shelving filled with every kind of alcohol imaginable. Palettes sat helter-skelter on the floor – here a shipment of apple cider from South Africa, there dusty water-damaged cases of Bénédictine D.O.M piled high. We trolled the aisles, entertained by the selection, amazed at the quantity, and bug-eyed at the prices. A litre of Bombay Sapphire Gin was C$13.
A separate temperature controlled room housed the wine inventory. Entering, we realized that the warehouse was the picture of tidiness by comparison. Cases of wine were stacked willy-nilly – some cases torn open, a couple of bottles removed, some toppled over, some looking like they’d been recovered from shipwrecks in the harbour a decade earlier. Selecting anything was pure guesswork, but we did our best in The Temple of Booze.
With the bar well stocked we carried on, south through Malacca Strait, around Singapore, and up to Tioman, positioning ourselves to cross the South China Sea to the city of Kuching, in Sarawak, one of two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo. The South China Sea worried us. We were concerned about pirates.
Nik often checked the International Chamber of Commerce Commercial Crime Services website to read up on acts of piracy. Just a few months earlier, a dist
urbing story had been reported from the very area we intended to cross. A tug and barge had been boarded by pirates, the seven-man crew set adrift in a small boat. The barge turned up in the Philippines; the stolen tug was never found. Fortunately for the crew, they were rescued off the coast of Vietnam six days later.
We decided to cross from Tioman to Kuching, sailing closely with another vessel. Greg and Sylvia, Australians aboard Escapades, were keen to mitigate their risk as well. Sailing together would be easy, as their boat was a sister-ship to ours, another Vancouver 42.
Our trip was uneventful until we sailed within view of the Riau Islands on our second day out.
“A boat appeared on the horizon from the southwest about half an hour ago,” Nik reported to me as I made my breakfast in the galley, preparing for the eight a.m. watch change. “Looks like an Indonesian boat. They don’t look like they’re fishing. I’m not sure what they’re up to. Maybe they’ll just cross our stern, maybe they’re just headed to the Riaus.”
We changed over in the cockpit and Nik went below to take a shower and ready himself for his off-watch. I kept my eye on the foreign boat while I ate my cereal.
“They’ve turned a little and they’ve fallen in behind us. They’re about a quarter mile off,” I called below to Nik.
Being intercepted by pirates seemed so positively unlikely, I thought. Then again if it did happen, we were in big trouble.
I radioed Escapades, a mile or so behind us on our port quarter. “What do you think of this vessel?” I asked.
“I don’t think it’s a problem,” Greg answered.
Ha! I thought, Of course he didn’t think it was a problem – they were following us, not them. Although I had to agree, it wasn’t the type of boat I would’ve expected for pirates. Pirates were more likely to be in a high-speed, highly maneuverable vessel. Pirates might have already given us a show of force, but this vessel, which appeared to be more of a cargo vessel, was just plodding along. Still, it was bigger than we were, it carried several men, it was catching up, and I didn’t like it.
“Can you put on some different clothes, then come back up here?” I called down to Nik.
“Okay, sure, but why?” Nik answered.
“I read that if you think you’re being approached by pirates you should make it appear that there are more people on board than there really are.”
He’d been bare-chested in surf shorts and reappeared on deck in camo shorts and an army-green shirt. He even had a camo ball cap on.
“Impressive,” I said, admiring his effort.
He took the paddle end from one of our sectional stand-up paddleboard paddles from a cockpit locker. Nik held it across his body like a firearm and started parading around the deck. From a distance, it probably looked pretty convincing. The dark orange paddle might have looked like a butt, the black shaft like a barrel.
“Maybe they’re just curious,” I said hopefully.
“Maybe,” Nik said, “but I wish they’d go away.”
Nik presented the onlookers with a good frontal view. Then he raised the paddle to his shoulder and took aim, sighting down the shaft. Right after he did that, the boat turned away and continued its easterly course.
Was it a risky, escalating move on our part? Maybe. Were they thwarted by Nik’s antics? We’ll never know. For all we know they were laughing at the funny white guy aiming a paddle at them from his puny boat. Either way, we were happy for the outcome, glad to be left alone to sail on to beautiful Borneo in peace.
After resting up at anchor in the lee of Tanjung Datu National Park, the northwestern point of Sarawak, we sailed on to the turtle sanctuary at Pulau Telang Besar. The view was stunning – a beautiful blue sky with towering white cumulus clouds forming over Borneo’s tropical topography, and in the foreground, turquoise waters lapping at black rocks on a white sand beach. Walking on the hard sand below the high-tide line we passed the higgly-piggly beach landscape of hummocks and pits on our way to the Ranger’s station. We found only three labourers on site.
There wasn’t much to see by daylight and one of the men suggested we return after dark. Near ten p.m., we donned headlamps to climb into the dinghy. As we got organized in the tender, we saw them everywhere – tiny baby hatchlings skittering around in the water beside the boat. Smaller than the palm of our hands they flailed in the current, so incredibly vulnerable, so apparently witless, acting on impulse to swim for the light. We quickly switched off our headlamps and waited for the hatchlings to move on before starting the engine to go ashore.
At the beach, they were everywhere in the shallows and on the sand, crawling over our bare feet. We marvelled at the sight of four females, all digging their nests above the high-water line. It was amazing to witness, but it was a sight we probably shouldn’t have been seeing. Later on in our travels in Borneo, we learned that other cruisers who had visited the island had been told by the conservation officer not to come ashore. It seems the officer had been away on the day of our visit and the labourer we’d spoken to had little interest in enforcing the rules. I was horrified to think we’d done the wrong thing.
The picturesque anchorage of Santubong delighted us. Surrounded by verdant hills and rocky outcrops, it was an exotic setting in the quiet calm of a river mouth. With its handy dinghy dock, friendly people, a resident crocodile, and its proximity to the city of Kuching, it was a great spot to settle in for ten days. We wasted no time in sampling Borneo’s delights, making day trips to Fairy Cave, Semenggoh Wildlife Centre for orangutan rehabilitation, and Santubong Cultural Village. We hiked locally, seeking out rock carvings, and farther afield in nearby national parks where we delighted in the pitcher plants the area is known for. The city of Kuching was also a fun distraction and provided wonderful provisioning at a shop called “Cold Storage,” a place that sold all the Western goodies we loved so much.
Just as we’d been wowed by Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) months earlier, we were thrilling to the adventures Malaysian Borneo had to offer. In July, we were just beginning to sink our teeth into it and we resented having to break our stride.
On our schedule for 2012 was a mid-year trip back to Canada. Our last trip back had been a rushed affair upon the death of Nik’s father in September 2011. At the time, we’d made some vague comments about returning for a Canadian Christmas, but once we were back in Asia, we knew our hearts weren’t in it. Too soon, too expensive, too detrimental to our own schedule, too not where we wanted to be in December. And so, we put it off and settled on a July trip instead. It was still expensive and still took a month of time from Borneo, but a July trip to Canada was more palatable.
Saying we were going was one thing, but making it happen was another. As always, it came down to where we could leave the boat, how we could get there, and where the nearest airport was. Miri, Sarawak, Borneo, over 300 NM along the coast, was our answer. The only trouble was the marina there refused to take reservations and operated on a first come, first served basis. Knowing that a fleet of boats would soon arrive for the Rainforest World Music Festival, we chose to forfeit a trip up the Rajang River to make a dash for Miri to secure one of the three remaining berths in the marina for ourselves. We had a plane to catch.
We returned from sunny Canada to the oppressive heat of Borneo with our fourteen-year-old niece. As always, we made a special effort to play tourist and have fun – flying from Miri to Gunung Mulu National Park for a two-day visit to the famous limestone caves before sailing northeast through Brunei to Labuan and on to Tiga Island, where the very first season of the TV show Survivor was filmed. We “bathed” in a cold mud volcano, swam and snorkelled, paddled around on our stand-up paddleboards, and sailed on to Kota Kinabalu (“KK”), where we enjoyed a dockside stay at the luxurious Sutera Harbour Resort. In KK, we jumped on another small plane, this time to Sandakan, in order for our niece to visit the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre. It was an action-packed, fun-filled three-week vacation that ended in, you guessed it, PGD.
But
when our niece left to fly home solo, there was no time for long faces. We still had a long bucket list for Borneo and we were geared up to check it off. Over ten days we harbour-hopped our way across the north coast before turning the northeast corner to sail down the east coast to Sandakan. After hastily reprovisioning in town we headed for the Kinabatangan, the second-longest river in Malaysia, our ultimate destination for the season.
Heading upriver on our second day, we crossed paths with our friends, Ken and Wendy on Cop Out. We were travelling in opposite directions but, wanting to catch up on one another’s news, we decided to stop and anchor together for some socializing and fun. The following day the four of us piled into their large dinghy to speed along the muddy river, stopping to drift and watch when one of us saw something of interest. While proboscis monkeys scrambled through the trees and impressive hornbills glided through the air, we chatted – the usual topics of where you’ve been, where you’re going, and what’s broken on your boat.
“What are your favourite places so far?” Ken asked.
“That’s a tough one,” Nik replied. “There’s been so much. The Pacific was fantastic, that’s for sure. We loved French Polynesia. We loved Vanuatu too.”
“Vanuatu was wonderful,” Ken agreed. “The people were fantastic. There was this one guy I remember, he gave us a huge pile of fruit and vegetables.”
“Ezekiel!” I shouted.
“Yes!” Ken and Wendy replied.
“My name is Bible name!” Nik chimed in.
“Always nice to say hello!” I added, smiling at the memory.
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