Kudat

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

Last night we spent on anchor in Labuan, we skyped with our parents and wished them Merry Christmas just in case we didn’t arrived to Johor Bahru in time to talk to them on Christmas Eve – Christmas in Czech Republic happen on the 24th. Originally our plan was to sail to Brunei first, but we decided to skip Brunei this time, in order to improve our chances to meet with our very good friends, who were flying to Langkawi for New Year. The odds that we would actually make it were not high, but we thought we would give it a try…

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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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Closet

By Jana Benešová

We are back in the working mode, getting up at dawn (round 6 am) and going to bed soon after 9 pm, exhausted but happy. We sleep so soundly these days, that often we don’t even hear the raindrops pounding on our deck. We sand, we glue, we paint and Janna slowly but surely undergoes a cosmetic metamorphosis. It’s amazing what a huge difference a paintbrush and a tin of paint can make.

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Hunting for Materials

By Jana Benešová

It’s been several days now since we lifted our engine out of the boat and put it on the pontoon next to us. Yet we are still in the process of material hunting. Currently we are shopping for new engine mounts, some SS to modify the current engine bed and after we found out that a new damping plate (between the gearbox and flywheel) plus shipping would cost us some 800 USD, we also added 4 small rubber cones to our list – after all it’s only these small rubber thingies that are broken.

We haven’t had much luck in Kudat so far. Luckily we live in the internet era. We easily found several engine mount dealers, some of them in Asia (mostly based in Singapore) and some in Europe, where we bought engine parts for our Volvo before. However, it seems that we will actually order our new engine mounts from a US internet chandlery go2marine.com. They are relatively cheap and the mounts will be sent by UPS, so could be here within a week or so.

As for the rubber cones for the damping plate, we decided to send them to Taiwan. In Kaohsiung there is an excellent shop where we always bought hoses, gaskets and other rubber materials. They also do custom work and since we have a sample – luckily one of the cones is more or less intact – we hope they would be able to find us the same material and make us new cones.

Now we are searching for some steel to modify our engine bed. In the afternoon we go to a Mr. Chin’s workshop – a local Chinese machinist, who promised to try to find us some steel angle and also some 316 SS for our new shaft. The advantage with Mr. Chin is that we can speak Chinese to him. Most of the Malays speak some basic English but it’s not enough to discuss technical stuff with them. Hopefully Mr. Chin’s hunt will be successful, otherwise we would have to go to Kota Kinabalu and try our luck there. Which actually is not such a big deal either, since we could also do some provisioning while down there.

Meanwhile the weather is still quite crazy. The constant downpours keep us inside the boat most of the time and so although we are currently trapped in Kudat once again, we console ourselves knowing that even if we could leave, the weather would still keep us right where we are. There are 2 new lows next to the Philippines, one of them was just upgraded to tropical depression and the other one has now 30-50% potential of becoming a significant cyclone. It sure is another rather busy typhoon season in SE Asia…

Current Graphical Analysis of the Weather in the Region

Unscheduled Return

By Jana Benešová

I’d much rather write about the adventures of a new voyage, first impressions from a new port or about new people we’ve just met… Unfortunately I have to admit that we are still in Kudat and it seems that we will have to stay here at least for another two to three weeks. The reason is simple. Have a look at the following picture and guess for yourself…

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Trapped in Kudat

By Jana Benešová

Month and a half ago when we sailed away from Philippines and arrived to Kudat, a small town in Sabah, also known as the „Land Below the Wind“, we thought we finally left all those potentially disastrous typhoons far behind. Turns out not quite so… Although it rarely happens that a typhoon ventures that south as Borneo, these cyclonic monsters can influence weather even in regions hundreds of miles away. And so here we are, already two weeks helplessly trapped in Kudat. It’s not that a typhoon’s path is predicted to go anywhere near us, but last week it was the super typhoon Usagi and now another typhoon Pabuk that is sucking in and thus intensifying the monsoon winds, which blow from south-west, i.e. exactly the direction we want to travel. The wind itself would not be such a problem, but the local waters are infamous for serious currents, that are strongly influenced by monsoon winds, and to sail on a small yacht not only against the wind, but also against a 2 knot current is not really much fun.

This is how it currently looks in SE Asia…

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Against the Winds and Currents aka from Puerto Princesa to Kudat (Part 2)

By Jana Benešová

Although we managed to avoid the two reefs in the mouth and in the middle of the bay, we motored too far inside the bay and hit the reef stretching from the far end of the Clarendon Bay! We tried to reverse and get out of the reef using our engine, but this time it didn’t work. It was clear that we needed some external help…

Luckily for us, soon after we entered the bay, we spotted a couple of local fisherman in wooden canoes. One of them was nearby so we called him to come closer to our boat. He couldn’t speak English but using hands and gestures we somehow managed to explain to him that we were stuck on a reef and that we need him to row our stern anchor back to deep water and drop it there. We would then try to winch ourselves off the reef.

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Against the Winds and Currents aka from Puerto Princesa to Kudat (Part 1)

By Jana Benešová

Everybody warned us: „You are too late!“ First we didn’t get it: „Too late for what?“

„Did they close the border to Malaysia?“ was the pretty much straightforward reaction of our Kiwi friends Jackie and Dave. The answer, of course, was much simpler – the South-west monsoon.

Once the SW monsoon sets in (roughly at the end of June, beginning of July), the boats trying to get from Palawan to Borneo have to fight not only head winds but also strong currents, which in some parts can reach up to 2 knots. On top of that, once the monsoon picks up, most of the anchorages along the way become inhabitable, so there’s basically nowhere to hide.

Of course, as relative greenhorns we didn’t dare to underestimate the warnings of the experienced sea dogs, nevertheless, during our one-month stay in Puerto Princesa we noticed, that the SW monsoon intensifies only for a couple of days, that are usually followed by a comparatively longer (e.i. in comparison to the NE monsoon) period of relative calm. When after 5 weeks of our stay in PP, one such weather window presented itself, we knew it was time to move to another anchorage.

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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…).