Singapore, a delightful, clean and safe city.

This is the backdrop to the marina at Keppel Bay where the rally boats are currently berthed. The buildings really are leaning in and the architect is the same one who designed the one in NY to replace the twin towers. They are currently 40 storeys high and going on up.







A model of the marina. Our pontoons are so new that they aren't on this model but are just about in the middle of the photo. The electricity meters on the pontoons were at zero. Real virgin berths!!





Sorry about the blurring. This was just about 6 yards across the equator. An important moment to record I feel. I also have one of the Dateline crossing. Oh dear! This should have been in the last set of photos but it got missed.





I had to include this. We had a meal at one of the malls nearby. This was my duck with chicken broth looking just as it did in the illustration and costing just £2.40. Tasted good too. Food is mostly incredibly cheap here though not at Raffles of course where a gin sling cost £12.50 and a curry £75. I had the drink but not the curry! Photos of that evening in the next post I hope.

And last but not least, this was my one indulgence at the Night safari zoo (open from 7.30pm til midnight every day) and where you travel around a circuit in trams to see many creatures of the night that are mostly sleeping during the day. A very good evening all round culminating in this...me putting my feet into the water and having them nibbled by hundreds of tiny fish. It feels exactly as you would imagine and they really do "clean" up your feet a treat. Should be on the NHS!

Singapore is a lovely city...this from a cityphobe. It's very clean, safe and cheap. Public transport is available everywhere at all times, buses taxis and underground and great prices. If it wasn't so flaming hot and humid most of the time, I could live here.... Might have to learn Cantonese though. I can't understand some of the "Engrish" at all!

We're leaving for Malaysia on Saturday along with a few other boats and we're looking forward to some pleasant daysails with overnight anchoring. Night sails aren't recommended anyway as the coast is overwhelmed with fishing boats. Too many yachts have tangled with fishing nets already and we've had some near misses too... We certainly don't want to add that to our list of mishaps! Next post from Malaysia then...........

Nice photos first. Reading comes later.

It is almost impossible not to get a cute photo of an orangutan baby!

Our guide and driver on the speedboat up the river in Kalimantan. Nice local people.

They also had this gibbon at the feeding centre deep in the jungle of Borneo. I thought they were bad tempered but maybe this one had learnt that if he bit, he wouldn't get any more bananas! There were peccaries running around below eating the discarded banana skins.Life is tough at the bottom!

A fairly typical Indonesian fishing boat. We saw hundreds of them lit up like Chrismas trees at night.

Errrrr...this is a picture of the river which we sped up (?) in Borneo ( Kalimantan). Trees fall into the river daily making progress ever so slightly hazardous!

Anexciting time all round....

Maybe I shouldn’t have written anything about dramatic entrances? Maybe I was tempting fate? Where and with what weather conditions might it be a very bad time for the engine to start to fail? I can tell you… In the middle of the second busiest shipping lane in the world and in the midst of a sudden torrential thunderstorm passing directly overhead with 35 knot gusts laying the boat right over and a waterspout about a quarter of a mile away. That’s where!

The story goes like this……. Singapore is just 20 miles away to the NW from Nongsa Point across the incredibly busy Singapore Strait which the yachts are advised to cross at the narrowest part 12 miles to the west of Nongsa. Several of us left as early as possible that morning to make sure we would arrive in Singapore in good time. The engine started perfectly and we were doing well for the first few miles but then it started to sound as though it was getting short of something…fuel or air maybe, so we managed to flag down another rally yacht, Fai Tira and asked them to stay close by just in case….. This they were happy to do (many thanks John and Pete!) in spite of having their own engine troubles….transmission I believe. The VHF radio was very difficult to use at the time as the airways were full of ships talking to each other while trying to stay away from one another.

We ploughed on with the yankee set to give us more speed as the sky darkened dramatically. The storm broke with almost horizontal rain bringing visibility down to less than a quarter of a mile. All the time, the engine was sounding more and more unhappy and we were only just making about two knots as we crossed the shipping lanes…one or two ships passing just a little too close for comfort….then the engine died completely, we could only just make way under sail and Fai Tira had to do a mercy dash around a small freighter to take our towline, which was all ready to go of course. We still had a few hundred yards of shipping to negotiate. It was close!!

Fai Tira towed us through choppy shallow waters until their engine started to protest and another Rally boat nearby, Laroobaa, took over as far as the marina breakwater. Many thanks to Guy and Simone! A few beers are now owed! After this, the delightfully helpful marina people were there to take us safely into the berth. A few minutes later, a mechanic from a local gin palace was on board and the problem quickly diagnosed and solved. (The gasket on the lift pump.) I know very little about these things except that it could have happened to anyone but that it so often seems to be Moonshiner! We were beginning to believe that this might really be the end of the Rally for Moonshiner as we didn’t know what the problem was at the time. The upshot of it all is that she is booked in for a major engine overhaul in Phuket, Thailand next month. We have just 600 miles and a month to get there so should be able to daysail gently up the coast……. I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, we are enjoying the luxuries of this very new marina at Keppel Bay. They are taking publicity shots for the marina at some point so we may appear on their website in due course. What I’ve seen of Singapore so far looks quite inviting too. I seriously intend to get to Raffles Hotel for a Singapore Sling. I feel I’ve earned one!

Last post Indonesia!

The Bluewater Rally in their wisdom had declared that the rally boats must be at “Nongsa Point” a couple of days earlier than we had all expected and planned for…..something to do with it taking a long time to deal with so many boats all at once. Nongsa Point I should say is the last stop in Indonesia where we would expect to “clear out” of the country before hopping across the Strait of Singapore to…….Singapore (!) which is all of 15 miles away.
Indonesian customs and immigration rules are strict and having tangled with them in Kupang, over a 1000 miles away to the east, we were all keen to do the correct thing, pay our dues and not upset anybody but, hey, Indonesia is absolutely huge and full of the most amazing and unique things…….I’m talking about orangutans here of course. Would you come all this way and just sail past? I think not!! And so, of course did most of the other Rally boats. As I write this part, anarchy rules and some of us are sitting at anchor in the midst of the most incredible thunderstorm awaiting a short trip up the river tomorrow morning to Kumai and thence a daytrip by boat forty miles upriver to commune with our hairy orange cousins. My only orange experience up ‘til now has been a daytrip to Jersey Zoo with Richard, then aged 7 in about 1994, when one of the Big Daddies swung across in the branches over our heads leaving in his wake the most overpowering stench of BO. I’m hoping to get a little closer to a couple of relatively fragrant babies this time!!!

The trip here to Kumai, Kalimantan (used to be Borneo) from Bali has been quite entertaining .The sail northwestwards into the Java Sea meant negotiating the Lombok Strait (again…we did it on the way to Bali from GiliAir) but in the opposite direction. I only just learnt recently that this narrow channel is the main one where water streams through to the Indian Ocean from the Pacific. Wow!! That’s a lot of liquid coming through. No wonder we saw whirlpools and reached 11 knots…in the right direction luckily. Be ignorant of your tide times at your peril. A significant number of yachts went aground en route to or from Benoa, Bali. Moonshiner was not one of them!!

We were in company for the 5 day trip to Kumai with Canadian “Angel”…..she’s a 42’ Halberg Rassy, lovely expensive Scandinavian boats but heavy and therefore slower than most of the racy new designs and the bigger boats or catamarans…….. OK, slower than nearly everybody else except Moonshiner and even we can beat her under sail, apart from the fact that we had to motor practically the whole way from Bali to Kumai. Refueling was therefore first on the agenda before any thought of going upriver into the jungle.

Tomorrow duly arrived after a very peaceful night, storms having abated, with us three boats resting at anchor in the river mouth. Around 6.30am after hauling up the “pick” (navy speak for anchor), we motored in a little convoy up to the strange little town of Kumai, a very busy port full of local and foreign trading vessels of all shapes and sizes. I quickly learned that this was a town with no beer! A lovely local man “Harry” arrived alongside and told me that the local governor got so fed up with all the drunkenness and killings that he banned alcohol in the town. Indonesia is not like other places.

Angel Val very quickly organized a daytrip for she and me via speedboat about thirty miles into the deepest Borneo rainforest while her husband David and Dick sorted out the refueling for both boats. We had the most wonderful time and the photos hopefully show a little of the experience. The orangutans, of which we saw around fifteen individuals, were absolutely delightful and it was such a privilege to be able to see them at such close quarters behaving quite normally around us. There were several other varieties of animal/bird/insect to spot too. We saw macaque monkeys, a gibbon, peccaries, a hornbill and other exotic birds as well as hundreds of spectacular butterflies. A very special day.

After getting back to the boats we were treated to the most incredible lightning display I have ever seen, several massive forks at one time striking the ground repeatedly in virtually the same spot and accompanied by such hard rain that it took your breath away. Nothing in Indonesia is ordinary it seems. I wish we could spend more time here……

And so the next day dawns with Angel and Moonshiner setting off again southwards downriver and then northwest for about 600 miles towards Nongsa Point with perhaps an overnight stop or two en route…………

Three days into this leg and we have had to motor the whole way so far. Not very good for the fuel consumption and there is some concern that we may run out before we get to Nongsa Point! Hmm. This part of the coast of Kalimantan is a haven for fishing boats and for the first two nights at sea we had to negotiate hundreds of them. I think they might be after squid as they fish at night with dozens of brilliant lights around the deck. This makes them easy to see at least. One boat though also had a long line trailing from the stern which Angel just managed to miss by sailing over and then tell us about before we hit it, so we turned away from it and tried to go around it. It turned out to be over three miles long, just little white floats every twenty feet or so and the odd flag on a stick every mile, no lights at all. Could have been a disaster!

There is almost constant lightning somewhere nearby at night and yesterday morning, we were given a spectacular close up of a rather black thunderstorm which passed by with a waterspout in its wake. Not something to get too close to but I hope the photos turn out well.

Another day and about 120 miles closer to our destination. Still lightning around but a long way off over land somewhere to the north. We are very close to the equator now. It’ll be strange to be back in the northern hemisphere after about 8 months and over 11000 miles south of the equator. We are away from the shipping lanes and fishing fleets now which makes being on watch a little less arduous. As I write, it’s 3.15am and the only light visible is Angel, about 2 miles ahead. Last night, I wouldn’t have been able to find time to use the computer as there were constant lights all around. Earlier on this afternoon we saw some dwarf spinner dolphins. This is a fairly newly discovered species according to the book. Interesting! The sea was also absolutely teeming with jellyfish, millions of them. Nice!

And so another day or two has passed….losing track of time. It’s quite normal when you spend long periods at sea because days blend into one another when watches start at 1am and never seem to end. Actually, we are now safely tucked into a snug berth at Nongsa Point marina which on first inspection is quite wonderful. Even civilized. We made yet another dramatic entrance however. This would be our fifth such except that this time, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the boat! Shall I remind you of previous arrivals? Why not?!!

No 1…. Being towed into Chaguaramas, Trinidad October last year by Pete on Troutbridge…high pressure fuel pump.
No 2…..Being towed into Puerto Ayora, Galapagos by Aqualuna, March this year after 5days of trying to make it back to the Galapagos. HP pump and generator failure.
No 3…..Charging almost uncontrollably into Papeete, Tahiti in May when the gearing went meaning the boat could only go full ahead or full astern or sit in neutral. No one waiting for us on the dock knew this. Had they known, they would not have been standing there!!
No 4….. Being towed for the last 500yards into Neiafu, Tonga by dinghy in June. Reason? Good old HP pump again….fixed once and for all by ace one legged engineer, Tevita in Tonga who fitted the replacement. No trouble since!
And No 5……Arriving here at Nongsa Point, Indonesia in the middle of a terrific thunderstorm with 35 knot gusts, overhead lightning and horizontal rain. As I said, dramatic, but at least the boat was running perfectly with just the slightest chance of running out of fuel within the next few minutes!

So we are here in this very pleasant marina for another day before the dash across the Singapore Strait to..............Singapore! Photos next I hope.

Bali away from the marina is absolutely lovely!

Val from Angel and I went to Ubud for a couple of days to see the real Bali and obviously had to see the traditional dancing with the "barong" (tiger) and the amazing fingers and eye expressions.





We stayed in a wonderful hotel built on the slopes of a lush green valley with two swimming pools and spas, temples etc. I didn't want to leave. This picture shows our room with balcony on left of centre.




There are millions and millions of scooters everywhere. They charge along the roads in all directions. Many people carry huge loads on them. This one was just so funny. I saw families of four all balancing on just one scooter.





A sacred place near Ubud, "The Elephant Cave" which is centuries old and encompasses Buddhism, Hinduism and who knows what else. I had to wash my hands here and say a little "prayer".





Val and I went to another dance (about witches and evil spirits) at a lovely temple here. This is the obligatory picture of course!
Bali really is amazing and I would highly recommend a visit. It's just so colourful and cheap.Every square inch is decorated it seems and I bought a lovely dress for just £4.00. My best bargain so far! I love the language. A dentist is a "doctor gigi". I shall be sorry to leave which we are due to do tomorrow morning but I am looking forward to seeing the orang utans in the wild. Next posting probably from Singapore in a couple of weeks.