Kota Kinabalu

Kudat to Kuching: A Rainy End to a Spellbound Voyage II

Leaving on a Friday is said to be inauspicious, but we were only sailing some 30 miles to a small island Pulau Tiga, where we planned to anchor for the night before crossing to Labuan, which lies some 40 miles SW of Tiga. That day we finally had strong enough wind to shut down the engine and sail, though of course the wind was once again against us… The weather reports predicted squalls and heavy rain, and sure enough, short after we made it to Tiga and dropped the anchor, the first squall hit us. Our hopes of sleeping in the cockpit were quickly abandoned as we hid ourselves inside the cabin from where we watched the terrifying lightings that were hitting the sea all around us. While amidst one of my melancholic broodings I tried reading a book, Petr busied himself reassembling our tiller pilot to see if the repaired circuit brings it back to life. Unfortunately the miracle didn’t happen and we had to face the gruesome fact that we would have to hand steer while motoring all the way to Singapore where we could buy a new tiller pilot. Yet we were not desperate, because at that point we were still hoping to see some of those monsoon winds?!

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Kudat to Kuching: A Rainy End to a Spellbound Voyage I

By Jana Benešová

This was supposed to be a relatively easy one. Not counting the passage from Taiwan to Philippines earlier this year, the voyage from Kudat to Johor Bahru was to be our first voyage ever when we would be actually sailing in the right season with the prevailing winds and currents and not against them. Marcello, an Italian sailor we met in Kudat, told us that last year the same time of year he sailed the whole way from Kudat to Phuket, had the engine running maybe for 2 hours during the whole trip. Not bad at all! Yet for us it just somehow didn’t happen… Instead of NE monsoon winds, we had either calms or were fighting headwinds, countercurrents, squalls and heavy rain. Ideally by now we should have been in Johor Bahru on peninsula Malaysia, yet here we are exactly 17 days after we left Kudat, sitting in rainy Kuching, capital of Sarawak, on the northwestern part of the island of Borneo. Not only is Kuching “the wettest populated area (on average) in Malaysia with an average of 247 rainy days per year”, the rainy season is in full swing now and most of the days it hardly stops raining. And when I say raining, I’m not talking about some minor drizzling but regular downpours. Simply put, the journey so far can only be described as downright miserable…

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Back in Kudat

By Jana Benešová

Hard to believe it’s been more than a month, since we arrived to Kudat, a small port at the north-east tip of Borneo… Time really flies and last month it flew even more so, since we were especially busy. Moreover, unlike our stay in Puerto Princesa, where we literally spent the whole month and a half aboard Janna translating, this time we were more often out of Kudat. While we traveled all around SE Asia, we left Janna in care of our friends Jackie and Dave of s/y Brigadoon safely tied to a pontoon in the local marina (which by the way is free! It hasn’t been officially opened yet and is run jointly by the cruisers in the spirit of a commune – people take turns cleaning the showers, share washing lines and clothes pegs, watch after the boats of those who are currently away plus even water their plants and take care of their dogs…).