We’re doing fine and had a great sail to Singapore from Phuket. We stopped in Langkawi for a few days on route. We planned to buy a new outboard there as the prices are duty free and we managed to pick up a Yamaha 8HP for a song. Our old Rude Evan which had been reliably unreliable for the last year suddenly started putting on a good performance but, sorry babe, too little too late! We still have her and she perches on the back rail next to the shiny new imposter! We also found that one of the engine hoses for the water cooling system was leaking so we had a wonderful day in the bilges changing out all the engine hose! What a struggle but all much improved now.
We spent a week sailing down to Singapore, most days we had runs upwards of 70 miles so it was a prettty long haul. We anchored all but one night so we were often getting up at 5am to make sure we made it to the next anchorage before dark. We had one night sail, scooting around Port Klang and One Fathom Bank and into the Malacca Straights at day break. Great place to have your first night sail – plenty of huge ships to look at and test your memory for light
We managed to find a fine line between getting snared in the fishing traps and nets close to the shore and playing with the big boys in the shipping lanes. We arrived at Admiral Marina, Port Dickson and had our first hot shower for nearly 3 months! It felt wonderful!! The last few days we had some great winds on the beam (20 kts gusting 25-30 kts) and anchored at some beautiful islands and arrived in Singapore on 1st Feb.
Apologies for the lack of photos in this post. Our faithful old laptop has finally given up the ghost. We took it in to the HP Headquarters to get it retuned and generally cleaned up a bit. They declared it pretty sick and in need of a new motherboard, which unfortunately they could not source for at least two weeks. Consequently we are now in the Funan Plaza in Singapore looking for a new laptop. Anyway as a result we have not had time to download the hundreds of photos in the camera, ah well . . . next time!
We’ve had a great stay here in Singapore having a bit of a rest, getting our Indo visae and other things sorted out and catching up with some old friends from Brunei. Tomorrow we’re leaving for Nongsa Point, Indonesia and are looking forward to taking things at a sightly slower pace. We hope to be in Bali by early-mid March and in the mean time we may well be out of touch for phone and internet coverage.
Tata till then!