Dark clouds are gathering above

The next day we started to deal with the most pressing problem. Our house batteries were behaving rather oddly for couple of days and we had to do something about that.

We bought them quite recently, the great Trojans, mind you, but they must have been from a bad batch or something. Got them in Taiwan, before we left. They didn’t last more than a couple of months. The first two we had before, lasted more than three years and still had life in them, but we wanted to be sure and bought the new ones.

Anyway, we realized (after being warned) that all we need is one battery failing and we lose all power. That’s the curse of 6V batteries, particularly if you only have two of them.

Shame on us. Shame on me, really, because Jana has not yet ventured into the world of pleasures of dilettante marine electrical engineering.

In Kuching, however, there is a plant. A battery making plant. I’ve always had a weakness for factories. That might sound strange, but there’s a kind of eerie beauty in all those entangled and twisted pipes and tubes, smokestacks and flues, conveyors and lifts… Unfortunately, this one was just an ordinary dirty building, so my aesthetic expectations were not met. Fortunately, though, they produce all kinds of batteries. If you’ve ever been in a candy shop, you know how we felt. We ordered two 12V deep-cycles ones. It took about a week. No, they don’t keep any stock.

When we entered the factory lobby, we were very kindly received by a Chinese manager. When we said our final yes and offered a deposit, he replied calmly:

“Kuching is a small town, it will be easy to find you.”

I would like to think there was a joking tone somewhere in there, but I’m not entirely sure what he really meant.

Before I continue, I should explain our state of mind. We spent last 4 months in a laid back and sleepy Kudat at the top of Borneo. We forgot about crime, pickpockets and thieves. We were expecting some of the good old civilization diseases in our next planned port of call, Johor Bahru. People have reported incidents there. But not here in Kuching.

So we visited an ATM, got the money for the batteries and went to town on bikes. Our lovely folding Dahon bikes are equipped with racks at the back and Jana’s has a plastic basket for veggies attached to it. While in the sleepy Kudat, we got used to carrying our bag in that basket. Do I need to continue…?

I was riding in front of Jana and suddenly I hear a scream and a shout. I slow down, turn my head and see a guy on a motorbike leaving shocked Jana with our bright yellow and green bag in his hand.

We start chasing him. But the traffic is sparse and he gains speed and soon disappears.

We curse and call him names. We feel violated. First thing to do is to get back to the boat, get on the internet and get our credit card blocked.

I took care of that and Jana went to the harbourmaster office (also the management of the marina) and tried to get hold of the police.

I met her there after about 10 minutes. One of the harbour officers was on the phone, obviously being transferred from one office to another. I started to be impatient (a big mistake in Asia) – how long does it really take to find a policeman in Malaysia. An older Chinese guy who was waiting in the office tried to educate me that Malaysia is not same as my country and that they do things differently here. That did not help. Not at all!

We called off the search for the police that would be interested in our case, I apologized for being angry and we went back to the boat to make an alternative plan.

First of all we needed money for the batteries. Fortunately we always keep a little bit of cash on boat. It was getting late, the banks will be closed soon.

We had to ride to the town and find a currency exchange.

When you come to Kuching don’t let anyone persuade you that the town is far from the marina. If you have a bike and a little courage, it’s about 15-20 minutes and only two short uphill climbs. The only trouble is the traffic, but it’s not too bad.

The next day our batteries arrived, we installed them into a new box that we got for them. And then we decided to wait for our new credit card. The weather was not great anyway, so we buried ourselves in the boat and worked. In the afternoon we went for bike rides, did odd jobs around the boat and generally enjoyed ourselves.

And then there was a flood…

In the end it took us 7 days to get into a port. Only not to Danga Bay as expected but only to Kuching instead. Hadn’t I known better I would have to believe that we must have left Labuan on a Friday. Or, were I more superstitious, I might as well start believing that leaving on a Tuesday is equally inauspicious…

For the first two days after leaving Labuan, we had either no winds or westerlies on the nose, plus again some weird countercurrent, so even when we were motoring, which we did most of the way (unless we ran into a squall and thus some wind), we were barely making 3 knots. To make matters even more interesting, on the 2nd day just after it got dark, we ran into a huge patch of floating tree trunks, logs and other flotsam. Miraculously we only hit two bigger logs since there were literally dozens of them all around us… On the 3rd day we finally encountered some NE winds, but after couple of hours we were back to motoring and hand steering again. The only sign of the NE monsoon that we experienced the whole way was a huge NE swell, which combined with waves blown up by the westerly winds produced confused seas that made our little boat sway like a cork in a whirlpool. Steering required one hand on the tiller and the other one desperately clinging to whatever in the cockpit so as to stay aboard.

On the 4th day we were still only 130 miles northeast of Kuching and we began to worry that if the weather continues like this we won’t have enough diesel to make it round Singapore. Thus we decided to head for Kuching to top up on diesel and water. All looked good, for once no rain, until about 9pm when we spotted a huge black veil covering the whole horizon. There was just no way of dodging this one… We braced ourselves in the cockpit, put on our wet weather gear and taking turns on watches slowly approached the awe-inspiring black mass. At that point little did we know, that what looked like a nasty squall in fact developed into a low pressure system that swept over us from west eastwards and forced us to stay hove to for more than 24 hours. The huge waves and strong winds blew us about 40 miles eastwards so once the gale quieted down, we decided to run for a small town called Mukah (approx. 150 miles NE of Kuching following the coastline) instead of Kuching. Finally we had the following seas and winds, except now we were actually going backwards from where we came…

In hindsight we can’t but marvel at our own stupidity, can’t even call it lack of experience, because anyone with a little bit of common sense would have guessed that the huge waves that were pushing our little boat over 6 knots surely must brake somewhere in the end… And where else than in front of Mukah, where the depths are 1 to 2 meters and it’s necessary to wait for a rising tide to actually get in… Soon enough we saw the powerful surf that even from over 10 miles away looked like a boiling cauldron covering the whole horizon with a white mist. There was just no way we could have got in and so tired as we were, we headed back to sea and in the direction of Kuching. Took us 2 more days of fighting headwinds, countercurrents, squalls and dense rain but at Christmas Eve we finally made it into Kuching’s Jabatan Laut Marina some 20 miles up the Sarawak river – quite a picturesque journey itself only as a part of our spellbound voyage, when we entered the river it was blowing some 30 knots against us, plus the tide was of course ebbing! Motoring at 2000 RPMs assisted by double reefed mainsail and partially furled genoa we were slowly tacking up river at enormous speed of almost 2 knots! Originally we wanted to anchor in Santubong river on the other side of town, but in the huge swell we feared that this anchorage might be cut off same as Mukah. But the marina here, though quite remote from town, is not bad and we even got to enjoy a “high pressure” shower before we went to an Indian restaurant for our Christmas dinner. And then we slept for more than 12 hours. So much for this year’s Christmas celebrations.

Yet the biggest blow we suffered actually came only after we got to Kuching. Our Kiwi neighbors (currently there are only 4 boats in the marina) told us, that there’s no way we can get across to Singapore for another 2 months because of the seasonal westerly winds that just started to blow. Surely that would explain the headwinds and countercurrent we experienced on our way here, but we still have to research about that… Can it be really possible that we came all this way and for nothing? We even started talking about returning back and going to Brunei after all… Who knows, maybe we might even haul out in Kudat… How absurd!

But I guess even this is part of the life aboard, not every day you get the sunny days and in the end experience such as these are soon forgotten in favor of those nice ones! Plus right now it seems there might be a good weather window at the end of next week, so provided the predictions don’t change (which they now do every day), we may be leaving in attempt to cross the South China Sea and round Singapore to get to the marina in Danga Bay, Johor Bahru after all. Or we retrace our wake and head for Brunei instead. Let the weather gods and Neptun decide!

First of all, leaving Kudat was not easy. After all we did spend almost 4 months there and that’s a long enough period to become attached. Many cruisers boast of a nomadic spirit but I guess from time to time even they don’t object to a spell of familiarity and some kind of a settled routine in their lives. It’s exciting to explore new harbors and anchorages, but it also feels good to know where you get a spare part in case of emergency or when they bring in a fresh catch of prawns to the local fish market and above all that if you need some help, your friends are just “next doors”. Often after a while the familiarity starts to feel too ordinary and you begin to long to go to sea again but when the time really comes to leave and say good-bye to new friends, this, especially for me, is perhaps one the most difficult parts of cruising. And this time it was even more so. Kudat may seem like an enchanted harbor in the sense we were trapped there for such a long time – first the weather and then the troubles with the engine bed etc.; but for me it will always be remembered as a special place – after all when Petr went to Taiwan interpreting for 3 weeks, I stayed there on my own, the longest period I ever stayed on the boat alone and thus have many personal memories of the place and above all the people. Memories that shan’t be forgotten.

Janna also underwent major metamorphosis there. The whole interior is now painted, joints between hull and bulkheads re-glassed and our engine got new mounts and above all with help of our friends a proper engine bed instead of just being screwed into the fiberglass as it was before. So in a sense Janna also was changed during our stay in Kudat. Something we are reminded of every day…

The last night we spent in the Kudat marina it rained a lot, but we were so tired from the last days’ preparations that we hardly noticed the pounding of the raindrops on the coach roof. The plan was to get the boat ready by the end of the week and apart from checking out with the local authorities take the Monday off and have some rest before the voyage. But first our house batteries mysteriously got themselves discharged, almost failing to start the engine, and then we found out that salt water is leaking into our diesel tank! So instead of resting we were shopping for a starter battery – something we should have done a long time ago – and tracking the source of the salt water coming to the engine room and the crack through which it was leaking into the diesel tank. These are not tasks you should be doing 2 days before a long passage across South China Sea! Maybe this should have warned us, that our problems were far from over. Yet at that time we interpreted it the other way round – hopefully after all these troubles, we are now more or less predisastered and the voyage itself will be just fine. Or so we hoped…

On Tuesday morning, our departure day, everything seemed alright. Even the rain stopped and so we cast off our mooring lines and waving to our friends slowly sneaked out of the still sleepy marina. One last look at the familiar masts in the marina and the adjacent boatyard that were slowly disappearing behind the horizon and there we were again almost 2 months later after our last attempt to leave Kudat, sailing in direction of Singapore and then through Mallaca Strait to Langkawi and Thailand.

Same as two months ago, there was almost no wind so we engaged our tiller pilot and kept motoring towards the Tip of Borneo. While the autopilot was doing its job, we sat back, watched the occasional fisherman and kept staring at the mesmerizing blue color of the sea. Janna was gently rocking and our engine was running as it should. Then after two hours our quiet sea meditating was suddenly interrupted by a weird clicking sound, after which our tiller pilot started violently veering off the course to port and then to starboard. First we thought it’s the bad contact in the socket acting again, but it soon became obvious, that it’s more serious than that. It’s not a good thing to lose your autopilot just at the beginning of the voyage, but we were hoping to encounter some monsoon winds soon. This way we could hand over the steering to our windvane Capehorn and so we decided to press on and hand steer in the meantime.

In the afternoon some wind did pick up but from the south-west, plus there must have been some weird current coming against us, because even though the sea was relatively flat, we were barely making 3 knots. Originally the plan was to go from Kudat straight to Labuan but now with the broken tiller pilot and no winds we decided to anchor for the night in Ugus Bay. Moreover we noticed that for some reason it’s really hard to hoist the mainsail, so it was prudent to drop anchor and see into the problem. Unfortunately Ugus Bay proved to be a very rolly anchorage and not even two glasses of red wine after dinner were enough to keep us asleep till morning. At 3 am I got up tired and frustrated to find out Petr was not exactly sleeping either and so we heaved the anchor and continued towards Kota Kinabalu. By leaving that early there was a good chance we might make it to KK still some 60 miles ahead before sunset.

Again the winds were against us but at least we didn’t encounter any squalls and after 14 hours of motoring and hand steering we dropped anchor in front of Sutera Harbor next to our friend Gevin on St. Jacob. It was his last night in KK and before he went ashore for a farewell dinner with his friends, he told us to come into the marina next morning and tie up the dinghy next to Patrick and Janice on Obsession, whom we briefly met before in Kudat. After taking the autopilot apart, Petr found a broken circuit, potentially the source of our troubles, so the plan was to go to town and try to have it repaired somewhere. Next morning Patrick and Janice first treated us to some coffee and then they lent us their bicycles, which was a real blessing. We spend the whole day riding all around KK’s highways, trying not to get ourselves killed by some insane Malaysian driver, and after being repeatedly send from one shop to another, in the end we actually found this tiny Chinese repair shop, where they managed to repair the circuit. Patrick, who works as a captain on merchant ships, only just got reunited with his family after another voyage, so we didn’t want to spoil their family dinner, but he and Janice insisted we stay and we spent a very pleasant evening on their boat. Before we finally left in our dinghy some time after midnight, Patrick tried to avert our next day’s departure by inviting us to a barbeque on Saturday, but we politely declined and promised that we will try to meet with them again on Monday when they come to Labuan to have their life raft tested.

It was Thursday and we wanted to heave the anchor and get back to sea, but after most Thursdays, Fridays follow and we’ve tried to leave port on Friday before with bad consequences…