This is how it currently looks in SE Asia…

It’s kind of frustrating. Every day  in the morning we use zyGrib to download the newest grib files which show wind predictions for the next couple of days. Every day we hypnotize the screen in hope of a weather window that would finally allow us to leave Kudat. Just yesterday it seemed we might be able to cast off next Monday, but today it’s a completely different story. And so our departure date is still quite uncertain at present. The only thing that keeps our spirits relatively high is the hope that tomorrow’s prediction may once again change…

To pass the time, we buried ourselves in the joys of manual labor. Now that all the translations we have been working on for the last few months are finally over, we took out our long-resting hammers, screwdrivers etc. and began yet another demolition.

Couple of days ago we met a very friendly Belgian guy Willie, who also owns a Halberg-Rassy, 35’ Rasmus. When he invited us for a visit, we instantly jumped aboard and had a close look on his boat to see if there are some modifications, that we could also use on our boat. We were immediately intrigued by the scuppers Willie made on the lower sides of his cockpit seats. The water drains through them and won’t collect around the cockpit locker lids, in other words another useful prevention from undesired leaks. Back aboard Janna we wrote down the idea to our endless “todo list”, so as not to forget it, and when it became obvious that we won’t be able to leave Kudat any time soon, we immediately set on the project.

However, we didn’t want to drill holes through the cockpit teak, that we spent so much time putting in last year, and so we decided to make the scuppers in the fiberglass edges below the cockpit locker lids. After all that’s where most of the water tends to collect anyway.

Also instead of copper tubes Willie used we made them out of polyester resin and fiberglass cloth. As a mold we used a piece of plastic hose, which we first sprayed with Silicot, so that it would be easier to get it out of the polyester tube once the fiberglass cures.

Then came the demolition phase – i.e. the part, that I personally dread the most. The boat gets filled with tools, spare parts and other odds and ends and you have to jump over it while at the same time paying attention not to end up in the opened engine room or bilge or some other “trap” that had to be set because of the current project. Plus it always turns out that before the demolition can even commence, something first has to be disassembled, emptied and thus the whole cockpit (sometimes even the main cabin) is suddenly flooded with boxes of various shapes and sizes, jerry cans, hoses, anchors and what not. To put it shortly, before the demolition proper, it is usually necessary to first undergo a preparatory one…

This time it was quite easy. We “only” had to empty two out of the three cockpit lockers and unscrew the locker lids and put them temporarily on the pontoon. Then we took some measurements and started the destruction. On both sides of the cockpit we drilled two holes, drilling under a slight angle, so that the water would drain even when Janna is heeled while under sails. Once again the tiny fiberglass sawdust was flying everywhere and our skin itched even after we took our evening shower. A good warm-up exercise before the haul-out in Langkawi…

Once the holes were drilled and sanded, we glued in the polyester tubes – first by using the quick hardening epoxy putty and then reinforced everything with more polyester resin and fiberglass cloth. We left it overnight to cure properly and then as the last step put on a plastic hose with clams. The lids were screwed back in place and a bucket of water was poured over them to test our new upgrade. It worked wonderfully! All the water drained away and not a single drop ended up inside the lockers. Hopefully the SW monsoon will calm down soon and give us chance to test the scuppers even when heeled and at sea!

We wanted to leave Taiwan before Christmas. Now we don’t even remember how we then imagined doing that. Do you know what the main obstacle that’s been keeping us here really is? Work. Naturally. Since the beginning of our “two year vacation” we haven’t paused for a bit.

So far we have followed the famous saying “study, study and study”, which has recently been transformed into “translate, proof-read, revise”. The fruit of our efforts seems to be quite consumable.

Naturally, we could enjoy our literary translation days in places other than along a promenade full of Mainland Chinese tourists in the middle of a smelly harbour. We are still here, because we have been asked to help out with a translation in a nearby factory. We admit that we have succumbed to the sweet jingle of money (actually it was more of a rustle).

However, even the weather tells us that we have little to complain about. Last month two smaller typhoons streamed right across the Philippines and last week has seen a tropical storm cutting it across southern Palawan and went totally bananas, turned back and smashed against Borneo. The world is changing, no doubt about that. Today the outlook in our beloved South-East Asia looks like this: Three lows are rubbing against each other, sucking down the monsoon, now cut loose, and it’s blowing hard and sooth is coming down from the sky. Is that necessary? I think not.

Not to mention that the Australian meteorologists had to add more colour codes to their temperature scale so that they can map temperatures surging up to 54°C.

In the words of a famous Czech playwright/writer/actor Jan Werich (I made no attempt to rhyme)

Oh yeah, we know all about it

And we say that

Let’s keep our heads buried in the sand like ostriches

It will burn our coat-tails at the most.

Only it could cost the people not only their coat-tails,

But lives and considerable amounts too…

Since we have to sit here for few more weeks, we started to work on project that we planned to leave till the Philippines, like a dodger a la Jean-du-Sud, i.e. instead of using stainless-steel pipes for the frame, we have used an inflated a fire hose. Seems to work just fine. Now we have to get down to sewing the actual dodger.

Also we brought a new mainsail from Hong Kong yesterday. Will try it out tomorrow if the weather is fine…

“I woke up every hour since midnight. Whenever the boat tugged harder on her mooring lines, I checked the whereabouts of the typhoon on the iPad. Once I was woken up by a splash of rain which got in through the half-open companionway. That’s what I call a rouse!”

During the last week we got completely accustomed to our live-aboard life. We rummaged through all our lockers and and shelves, we rearranged the mess on the quarterberth, where we put everything we want out of our sight, and we have sorted all the remaining bags and boxes and their formerly mysterious contents to allocated spaces. After a rather disconcerting arrival, we have finally settled down, once again we know where everything is stored, we relearned how to reach for this or that most effectively, where to duck so that we don’t smash our heads, and how to lean against the bulkhead when we wash the dishes and the harbour police motorboat passes by.

Slowly, but steadily, we improve our little floating home. Before we left Hong Kong, we bought a new cabin light, because the old LED didn’t do a proper job and we wanted to have a red light for night passages. The new light has two switches, one with three states: white light, off, red light, off, and so on. That means that to get a white light, you have “click through”, which started to annoy us. The second switch, labelled “Spreader”, was disconnected. So I have rewired the whole thing, each switch controls one bulb and we can even turn both bulbs on. Together they light up the cabin quite nicely. The red rubber thingy that was on one of the bulb was fried dry and fell of anyway. So when we need red light, we slap some red foliage over the whole light.

We also finally mounted our new fan. We longed for a rotating fan that would stir the air in the whole cabin. We bought ourselves a cheap 15USD Chinese auto fan and so far it does a very good job. We’ll see how long it lasts at sea, but the marinized fans are so expensive that this is the only option for us anyway. Before mounting we ran the fan from the nav table for few days and we soon found out that the switch is getting very hot when ran at slow speed. So we tied the switch right on the fan. It’s a hideous little plastic box and it gets almost lost on the fan, not to mention that it’s cooled by the passing air.

With some concern we have pumped out the diesel tank, expecting a swamp since on our last trip before going back to the Czech Republic we had to change the prefilter twice. We were nicely surprised that it was actually quite clean. We filtered the diesel, topped the tank to prevent condensation and we also calibrated a new fuel dipstick. The engine started without a fuss, purring along. We only adjusted the idling speed. What a relief! (Having had our share of troubles with the engine in the past and Volvo Penta spare parts being so expensive, we still get a little nervous when starting the engine sometimes…)

Even though the typhoon was approaching, the weather was still good yesterday, so we jumped into the water and scraped off all the barnacles and other crap that started to breed on our hull. Unfortunately we have found out that our tiny zinc disappeared from the prop shaft and that the propeller has been seriously eaten by the stray current, which is quite considerable here in Kaohsiung. No electrical standards have been applied to the wiring of this marina. From time to time people get an electrical shock from the steel fence, wires are routed through the water everywhere. Our small zinc that we screw on the prop shaft was perhaps too little or just fell off due to the corrosion. Well, we had to bite the bullet and order a new propeller. When we haul out in Hong Kong in autumn we have to improve our zincing possibilities. We don’t plan to stay in marinas much, but one never knows.

For this weekend we had plans to sail to a small island about 17 miles from Kaohsiung, but we have to postpone that, not only because we are propeller-less, but more importantly, we need to wait for the seas to calm down after the typhoon’s gone…

Prices of fruits and vegetables often shoot up after typhoons so we stocked up in advance