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Singapore and Malaysia October - November, 2006
We arrived at Raffles Marina in Singapore after crossing the dreaded shipping lanes across the Singapore Straits. These Straits are the busiest in the world and a ship passes every 4-5 minutes going both west and east along the Straits. The supertankers are huge and Peter wanted to wait for a while to gage the distances for us to weave in and out of the ships. After about 10-15 minutes we started on our crossing of the shipping lane. Thankfully Peter got it right (as usual) and we crossed without any problems. The crossing is only about 2 miles but it seemed the longest two miles in history.
Spent 2 weeks at Raffles, our treat, one would say it was a mini holiday for us. Raffles had a pool, hot tub, and Gym and we took full advantage of all these facilities.
Raffles also provided a free bus to the MRT (Metro Rapid Transit) which took us into Downtown Singapore. We had a riot!! One of our first stops was to an Electronic Mall (7 floors in all) of consumer electronic goodies. Even though we replaced all our electronics and autopilot before we left Vancouver, after more than 3 years of cruising, stuff starts to go and has to be replaced. It's quite a harsh environment at sea and plays havoc with silly things like zips, tshirts rotting, etc etc.
We bought a camera, computer and a hand held VHF. Joyce's camera was a throwaway job and our computer died on us on the way to Singapore and the handheld was a priority for the boat as our old one also died.
The gardens at Raffles Hotel Information on the famous Long Bar in Raffles Hotel
We also had time to visit the Zoo, Night Safari, downtown historical buildings, and even went into Raffles Hotel and had to take a mortgage out to pay for our drinks (only 6 - there were three of us), $110 Singapore dollars (Cdn $85 approx). I went to find out about afternoon tea at Raffles and the cost was horrific so decided not to partake. Still the old Raffles Hotel was magnificent and I took many photographs for my memories.
The two weeks sped by and we still had things to do but our time was up and had to check out. There will always be another time to come back and visit the places we missed.
Motorsailed down from Raffles and around the point. It seemed funny but 75 metres out of Raffles Marina in the channel we were in Malaysia. So the first day we went about 35 miles to our anchorage at Palua Pesang not a bad anchorage. Motor sailed most of the way because of fickle winds. We were on our way the next morning by 4 am to get a good start on our 70 mile journey to the next anchorage in the Water Islands. We had to zig zag to avoid the fishing nets. The nets are a real hazard and sometimes they are not even marked. One or two of the boats coming out of Palua Pesang got caught up in these nets. It took one guy an hour to untangle the nets from his prop!!
From there we day hopped up to Palau Kangkor a beautiful island group before making our way to Langkawi Island in a 165 mile hop. Again on the lookout for those dam nets.
We encountered fish boats after fish boats and in some cases there were more than 200-300 boats in a very small area of fishing grounds.The trawling fish boats are also a hazard they don't stop for anyone and many times we had to veer away from boats doing 15 plus knots with determination.
Thunder and lightening storms were frequent and we even had a water spout that was enormous following us at one point. That was quite frightening but in the end the water spout nor us were interested in a confrontation, thank heavens. We had the spout about 150 yards behind us and following us and couldn't decide which way it was going so it was decided to veer off 90 degrees fortunately the right way and saw it move off. We heaved a sigh of relief it was a really stressful 20 minutes for us. During all this mayhem the fish boats were heading back even faster than usual to their villages and we had to negotiate through the maze of boats as well. So it was quite an adventure motor sailing up the Malacca Straits, not with Pirates this time. Our arrival at the Royal Langkawi Yacht Club (RLYC) was well received by both Peter and I.
We spent a week at the RLYC for the last week enjoying the sights of Langkawi a very beautiful Island. We haven't been up to much but did spend a day going around the Island in a car and saw most of the Island by lunch time. We had a long lunch! One really intere4sting place was the cable car facility near Telaga Harbour
Cable Car facility near Telaga Harbour Peter in amongst the flowers at Telaga Harbour
We checked out of Malaysia for Thailand and took about 2 weeks to reach Phuket where we anchored. More on Thailand in our next u
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