The Joys and Sorrows Of a Life At Sea

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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