By Robin Hirsch

Today I caught my first fish. I was amazed. I was so excited.

Two weeks ago we arrived back in Raffles Marina in Singapore. Our return from Sabang was pretty fast, as we wanted to be in Singapore by mid April. Our children were eager to meet their friends, and Ute and I wanted to visit the Singapore Yacht Show, an opportunity to talk to some of the Leopard catamaran people about work that is still open.

We had our longest offshore passage with approx 250 miles from Sabang to Langkawi. I have a draft post on that, when I get to it. In Langkawi we picked up some shipments we had ordered: our scuba gear, and the watermaker for the boat. This will be a key improvement: currently our ability to stay away from marinas is limited by our fresh water supply. Our tanks last us approx. two weeks. The watermaker filters salt out of seawater. As long as we have enough power to run it (from solar or the Diesel generator) we have unlimited fresh water supply. Once installed, this should extend our cruising range from weeks to months.

From Langkawi we returned to Singapore in one week, bypassing Penang and Pangkor with a 24 hour passage, a stopover and beach day in the Sembilan islands, and a day at the marina in Port Dickson. Our last leg was another 36 hour passage, which included the check in clearance into Singapore at Sister Islands.

Overall our trip to Langkawi, Phuket and Sabang took 5 months, with a distance of approx. 2300 nautical miles (4300 km). We learned a lot about living on a boat, had some phenomenal diving, stunning scenery and beaches, met a new tribe of people and made great new friends, and spent all this time together as a family.

And we decided that we should continue this journey for a bit. Somewhere out there something incredible is waiting to be discovered.. so we will go and look for it.

We learned that the best laid plans can change anytime, sometimes because a better destination appears, sometimes because the weather is not favorable. Currently we plan to head East for our next journey: to Borneo, for the rainforest, Orang Utans, and world famous dive spots, and then to continue into Eastern Indonesia and the (even more famous?) Raja Ampat coral triangle. Our planned route is marked in green on the map below. We will cover roughly the same distance again, 4500 km, mostly in daytime-only hops. This will keep us busy for the rest of the year:

Our 4-5 weeks in Singapore now are filled with boat projects and provisioning to prepare for this adventure. Around mid-May we plan to head out. The Rainbow Safari continues…

Today I am heading to Puteri Harbour for the pre-rally briefing of the Sail Malaysia- Passage to the East rally. Ute and I decided that it will be easier for me to go on my own, then for us to drag the children across the border. The Puteri Harbour marina is maybe 5 km away from Raffles Marina, on the other side of the water way between Singapore and Johor Bahru/Malaysia.

We can see the Tuas bridge from our boat and we have crossed it many times in our own car. Today is the first time I am using the Causeway Link bus, which is the public cross-border bus service. It seems the natural and economical thing to do, given the short distance. The bus costs $4, a rental or private hire car across would be approx. $80. And I am just curious to see how it works!

The Causeway Bus leaves just outside Raffles Marina, a 5 minute walk from the boat. I have to wait another 5 minutes for the bus to arrive. It takes me into the Tuas border checkpoint which is only half a kilometer away, but not set up for any pedestrian traffic – bus or car is the only permitted means of transport.

The border crossing is simple as can be. Get off the bus and walk into the Singapore departure immigration hall. Go through the same automated passport reader gates as at Changi airport. Get back onto (any) Causeway Link bus and drive over the bridge. Get off at the Malaysia immigration hall, where again there is no queue and in less than 45 minutes from leaving the boat I am now in Malaysia. Piece of cake.

There are several bus routes leaving the border checkpoint, and I just need to wait for the next bus going to Puteri Harbour. The wait for the onward bus is 30 minutes, the first delay so far. And then another 15 minutes or so until we leave.

Once under way the bus journey is fast. I reach the Puteri Harbour marina development at 11:40, almost two hours after leaving our boat. Puteri is typical for the new developments around Johor Bahru. An entire new city, planned and built in the middle of nowhere. New high-rise apartment blocks, retail space, and in this case, the marina. Reasonably nice design and landscape, but occupancy is perhaps one third only, and everything is void of people and life. It is unclear to me how this real estate development will ever pay for itself, but no doubt a few Ringgits were passed over or under the table in the process.

I have some time to kill before the rally briefing, so I let the advertisement message win me over while I wait out the thunderstorm: “A 15 minute vacation”:

My last Starbucks coffee like this must have been a year ago, when I traveled to Jakarta regularly for IBM. That has me thinking. Really it’s a day off, not just a 15 minute vacation. It’s my first day away from the kids (my primary job as a dad) and Ute since… last October maybe? Or more likely June? I don’t remember. I guess that means that we are meeting our most important objective of our sailing adventure: spending time together as a family 🙂

I was going to continue the blog on the return journey, but it turned out I could catch a ride back with the local distributor of International Yacht Paints, whom I met at the briefing. We did have a bit of a border traffic queue coming into Singapore, but the return was a very comfortable 1.5 hour drive rather than the expected bus ride.

The rally briefing was the really interesting part of the day and worth it’s own blog post. For now I’ll just say that we are now committed to the next leg of our adventure: exploring Borneo!

We had a great time in Sumatra, busy with diving and snorkeling and spending time with our friends from Field Trip.

The geography of this little spot is interesting: we anchored off a little village called Iboih, on the island Pulau Weh. The larger town on this island is called Sabang, so many people just refer to all of it as Sabang (island, village, dive spot…). Sabang is at the Northwest end of Indonesia, off Banda Aceh in Sumatra, and there was a big monument called km0 at the Cape North of Iboih. From here the 20’000 odd islands of Indonesia spread East to Papua New Guinea, and South to a few hundred kilometers from Australia. An exciting (and inviting) land bridge that we could follow, pretty much always with land in sight.

Because of its location at the North End of Sumatra, Sabang is also a point on the trade route from the straits of Melacca to the Indian Ocean. All the oil and gas traveling from the Middle East to Asia/China, and all the goods delivered on huge container ships from China to Europe via the Suez canal pass just North of Sabang. More on this later.

Off Sabang the ocean floor drops dramatically. Within a few hundred meters from the shore the sea is 1000 meters deep. There are few shallow anchorages, the one where we stayed was in a narrow channel betwee Iboih and a smaller island. The rapid change in depth causes strong tidal currents. We had to be careful both swimming and diving, as we did not want to get swept away to India 🙂

The water is clean and clear, and the currents provide food for coral and fish. Sometimes you can spot whalesharks and other big fish when diving – I had a group of Eagle rays on one dive, Ute and I saw a 2.5m reef shark on another. The Field Trips recommended a great dive instructor at the Iboih Dive Center, and Nyala signed up for her first Padi course and her first scuba dives, while Ute learned more first aid and diving skills in the Rescue Diver course. Whenever we could fit it into the busy learning schedule I went for fun dives, or I took the other kids snorkeling. One day Hero decided that she is now old enough for snorkeling, grabbed a mask and snorkel and it has been difficult to get her out of the water since.

We could have easily stayed longer, but want to be back in Singapore by mid-April. Keeping an eye on the weather, wind and wave directions, our best weather window for the passage from Sabang to Langkawi was going to be the weekend of March 30 and 31. So after a movie night on Field Trip watching “Wreck it Ralph”, and with the confidence we gained on our first passage from Phuket, we lifted our anchor and took off.

Here is your awesome Monthly Yacht!Monthly Yacht April