There’s a consequence to spending 55 years cruising: Life becomes too perfect. When that happens, you’re forced to reassess and refocus on the big picture. And so it was not long ago that I reluctantly decided our lives were becoming too tranquil. We had enough money. The local weather was perfect. Our ketch-rigged Wauquiez Amphitrite 43, Ganesh, floated right on her lines. Thailand was still the Land of Smiles. We had no problems.

“Are you happy?” I asked my wife, Carolyn.

“Absolutely,” she yawned from the other side of the cockpit.

“Me too,” I said. “Damn it!”

We were in the dreaded Paradise Rut, and I sensed trouble. I knew my job as skipper was as much about keeping it fresh as it was about keeping it going. And bliss, in too large a dosage, can be wearisome. So I decided to radically shake things up. First off, I needed an entirely new cruising venue and style, and then I needed some shipboard confusion tossed in for good measure.

The latter was easy; we just had to invite numerous old and new friends aboard. Camaraderie and confusion would surely result. But find a new approach to cruising, after all these years? Was that even possible? What could mix boats and water in an entirely different way for us?

My lifelong friend Dave, whom we call Lovik the Lazy, is like Travis McGee, the protagonist of John D. MacDonald’s paperback thrillers, sprung to life. He lives quietly in the shadows, where danger is high, money loose and life expectancy short. He has no — nor has ever had — a fixed address (well, except for when he was an occasional guest in the big house). Lovik is beyond all borders, outside the law and far in excess of any common sense. He’s raw male adventure personified, regardless of whether he’s at the helm of the motoryacht Foxy Lady in Minnesota, the racing sloop Rocinante in New Orleans, or the schooner Gracie in Cartagena.

He’s the man I’d like to be — if I wasn’t so married, could hold my liquor and didn’t mind shedding a few grams of morality. He’s also currently in poor health and staring the Grim Reaper in the eye. It was time for our last hurrah.

It is only a day’s sail northward from Ao Chalong Harbor in Phuket to Koh Phanak in Phang Nga Bay. The sou’west monsoon was firmly established, and we started out with a brisk westerly breeze that faded away to nothing in the afternoon as we ghosted amid the spire-shaped rocks.

Our first attempt at gaining entrance to a hong — a pool located in the middle of an island and accessible by cave — was a dismal failure. Lovik the Lazy ­occupied the kayak’s co-pilot seat, wheezing heavily. The problem was that our quest was doomed because the tide wasn’t right. Only at midtide was the water low enough at the chamber entrance to pass under it, but high enough to float on in.

We were unaware of how small our window of opportunity was. All we knew was that a deserted private lake was hidden inside the mountain before us, and yet open to the sky. Navigating the cave mouth leading to it wasn’t ­difficult. We had light. But the light gradually faded. Still, we kept going in our tippy boat, until Lovik screamed and something hard and sharp hit me in the face. I tasted blood. We’d paddled right into a gigantic stalactite, and almost tipped over into the inky brine.

“Can’t see a thing,” said Lovik the Lazy, obviously rattled at being entombed in the dark. Then we heard the bats and sensed them flittering and flapping above. Hey, bats don’t bite. Not usually. Unless … There was also the sound of dripping water, as if eternity itself were somehow on trial just ahead in the velvet blackness. Something large splashed into the water just astern. “There are no crocs in Phang Nga Bay,” I told Lovik, to reassure him.

“Probably just a water moccasin,” said Lovik.

“I don’t like snakes,” I said steadily, making sure my voice sounded calm.

“Are you sure you know how to navigate back out?” Lovik asked. “We’re not going to be, like, trapped in here, are we?”

“I think the entrance to the cave is over that way.” I pointed into the black ink as the kayak heeled slightly. “Or, perhaps, more to the left.”

“This is impossible without light,” Lovik said. “I thought the caves were short. It’s noon outside. I thought we’d see the light of the interior hong before we’d lose the light of the entrance.” “Me too,” I sighed.

Poor Lovik the Lazy. He’d flown halfway around the world, and fate, it turned out, would dictate that he never saw the interior of a hong before flying  home.

I’d known him since I repaired his boat’s engine with a beer can and a pair of tin snips in 1970, along the banks of the mighty Mississippi — in other words, a long time ago. But before he left Ganesh at the conclusion of this latest visit, he told Carolyn and me that he’d read one of my stories — it was about ditty bags — with great interest. Then he shyly regifted us the intricate ditty bag Carolyn had hand-made for him 45 years ago.

“I’ve cherished it every day since,” he said with a smile, “but now it’s time to return the bag to active duty on behalf of its rightful owners.”

“Is that a bullet hole?” I asked, sticking a finger through the frayed fabric.

Lovik the Lazy shrugged noncommittally.

Old friends are the best.

A few weeks later I sat bolt upright in my bunk and said, “Google Earth!”

“Go back to sleep,” Carolyn said groggily. “You’re crazy!”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said, and slipped out of our bunk in search of my cellular-connected iPad Air. As I suspected, Google Earth clearly showed where the hongs were via satellite imagery, so I had them all at my fingertips — but not their entrances. I was closer in my quest to see them all, but not yet confident I could find my way into every one.

Later that day I was ashore in Ban Kho En, a tiny village awash in a sea of Thai Buddhists, and asked a fisherman about the hongs.

“You going to deserted, rarely visited hongs first,” he said. “No good. Go James Bond first, then follow tourist cookie crumbs into busy hongs. Easy!” James Bond? “It’s a tiny vertical island in Phang Nga,” Carolyn told me later. “Some call it a nail. Anyway, The Man with a Golden Gun was filmed there. Remember the dueling scene on the beach with Roger Moore?”

“Not really. I’m more a Sean Connery kind of guy,” I replied.

Still, we did as we were told, and soon discovered numerous large excursion boats filled with white-skinned farangs and multicolored kayaks. These dispersed to nearby isles, launched their kayaks, and loaded them with said tourists, and then everyone disappeared into the side of the mountain, like a magic trick.

We anchored next to an empty excursion boat late that afternoon, and noted the nearly invisible hole in the mountain that its crew and passengers emerged from. Once the head boat was gone, we had the area to ourselves. Carolyn chose the front seat of the kayak. This time we both wore headlamps. Light made it far less scary. Bats covered the cave’s ceiling like fluttering, slumbering fur. This entrance was narrow; often it was difficult to paddle without hitting the cave walls. We fended off frantically with paddles, as the rock was razor-sharp. Crabs scurried. Water bugs slithered. Fish jumped. We paddled deeper and deeper, and then made a 90-degree turn to the left. Both of us nearly jumped out of our skins as a congress of startled monkeys laughed at our clumsiness.

Then, with another turn to port, we emerged from the gloom into bright sunlight overhead, and the strange and wonderful world within the near-­vertical walls of the hong.

“Holy moly,” whispered Carolyn in  awe.

“I’ll be damned,” I said, attempting to gulp it all down at once. “It’s our own personal Jurassic Park!”

Over the next few days we fell head over heels in love with hongs, blown away by their beauty. There’s a strange eeriness that cloaks them, as if raucous mankind rarely intrudes. The air has a strange quality to it: fungal and moist. Since the sides of the mini-canyons are almost vertical, the floors don’t get much sun except at midday. Thus ­lichens and slimy, creepy-crawly things abound. Inside, there’s almost perfect silence, save for the occasional noisy monkeys and birds. Clouds of butterflies swirl.

We barely managed to squeeze into one cave by lying back in our kayak. Once inside, we discovered to our chagrin that we could have come in its eastern entrance with a dozen 43-foot ketches rafted together.

Whatever our expectations were, they were always both shattered and exceeded. I couldn’t get enough. I had to see more, and knew just the person to call.

Paddl’n Sue Chaplin was born to great wealth in Philadelphia, and threw it away at her debutante party when she realized her parents already had her husband picked out. She balked and walked. Then she asked the first man she met who smelled like a billy goat to marry her. He said yes, she said I do, and her parents fainted while redrafting their will.

Susan felt she’d been too coddled and too entitled. Since her new hubby smelled like a mountain goat, Sue decided to become one. She climbed the 13,766-foot north face of Grand Teton in Wyoming with Irene Ortenberger; they were the first pair of females to do so, and they’re still casting bronze plaques to celebrate the accomplishment. (Susan came off the mountain, fell, and ended up dangling from a swinging rope in free space twice ­during the arduous climb, much to the dismay of Irene, her belaying partner.)

Next, Susan fell in love with surfing. Then, as she aged, she slid into being an endurance athlete via Ironman events. Her chosen method of insanity is now offshore paddleboarding, using solely her hands. (“Paddles make it too easy,” she claims.)

I met her when she was paddling, on her stomach, down the Lesser Antilles.

“Do I smell like a goat?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Thanks,” she replied.

It was love at first whiff.

Perhaps I’m not being clear. Susan is a tough ol’ broad. Carolyn calls her the “70-year-old, 120-pound muscle.” Nothing stands in her way — not mountains, caves or hongs. She’s notoriously fearless. “Just make sure you’re always aware of what the tide is doing,” I told her as we headed off from Ganesh, bound for her first hong.

“Why?” she asked.

“There’s a 6- to 9-foot tide here in Thailand,” I explained. “If you paddle into a low cave at dead-low water and linger too long, you can’t get out. You’re trapped, perhaps with limited air or perhaps with no air at all.”

“But you’d have found a new, way-cool spot, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Good enough,” she replied.

Susan is one of those people who live totally on the edge. She firmly believes the idea isn’t to escape injury but rather to live life fully, and has a body full of pins, posts and other stainless-steel parts to prove it. She was completely gobsmacked by the hongs. “They’re like whole new private worlds,” she reverently whispered. “Totally awe-inspiring!”

After our first visit to one, she never allowed an opportunity to see another hong to slip by, regardless of how long the paddle or how dark the cave.

One day we were amid a crowd of idle men in a small Muslim coastal village, and they were watching us intently at the village water pump. Carolyn filled our jugs. I held our inflatable just off the beach. Susan, 70 years young, swung one of the heavy jugs onto a shoulder of her diminutive frame, to the utter astonishment of all.

The men’s mouths were agape.

Susan stopped to chat, just to show them her load was insignificant.

“Keep moving!” I shouted to Susan as I lounged on the dinghy tube while inspecting my nails. “Especially if you’re going to be so lazy as to only carry one jug at a time.”

“Well, aren’t you the gentleman,” Susan huffed, but I could tell she loved being the macho-muscled one on ­Ganesh.

The good news is that I can earn my living anywhere I go. Enough pennies drip out of my pen to buy jasmine rice by the kilo, we catch plenty of rainwater, and the sea is filled with fish. There’s a downside, of course: Wherever I go, I do indeed have to earn my living. I’m never on vacation, especially while in the middle of yet another cruising adventure.

“Goddamn it!” I shouted, while punching the send button on my Mac Air. “Why won’t this book manuscript leave?”

“Outta cellular range,” said Carolyn, adding, “Don’t have a cow, OK?”

“Well,” I said in exasperation, “do something! And, hey, don’t forget to order those self-steering blocks from Budget Marine as well.”

A few weeks later, Shai and his wife, Lorraine, were welcomed aboard. Shai is an Israeli marine electronics technician who owns The Wired Sailor service company in Dutch Sint Maarten, and who also just happens to live aboard an identical Wauquiez Amphitrite 43. This is fortunate, as it saved time on crew training when he and Lorraine joined us for a hong adventure of their  own.

Lorraine sits on the bored (sic!) of Budget Marine, but that’s a whole other story. The important thing is that she dutifully toted down the high-tech Harken blocks I requested for my Monitor windvane. Later that day, I grinned as I heard Shai happily click together his wire crimpers and say, “Perfect. Your coax measurements were spot on.”

He’d designed and built an entire Wi-Fi and cellular system in his workshop back home at the Simpson Bay Yacht Club, and it had taken only 20 minutes to install it aboard Ganesh. It consists of a wide-band Bullet antenna and a 12V Pepwave (Max BR1) router. With these, I could grab distant Wi-Fi signals and occasionally get blistering Internet speeds from 20 miles offshore via a SIM card. “The installation went well,” I agreed. “Technically, we didn’t get hong up once!”

“That’s what I’ll do if a bill collector rings up,” Carolyn chimed in. “I’ll just hong up on him!”

“Our flight was a long one,” said Shai, who knows how to go with the flow. “Now Lorraine and I are ready to get hong over!”

Lorraine is a business and accounting whiz. She has many employees and 160 clients besides Budget Marine. This means she is sharp as a tack, and able to converse on any and all topics, including James Bond movies, which she adores. So we decided to take her to the island set of The Man with the Golden Gun. Before going in search of the hong, she and Shai would be able to re-enact the dueling-on-the-beach scene with our flare guns.

But it was difficult to get close to where we wanted to land on said island — impossible, actually, with 6 feet of draft. So we anchored 2 miles away, with a submerged rock to port and a shoal to starboard. The current was strong between the countless ­vertical-sided rocks, almost 5 knots at full ebb. Navigational dangers were everywhere. None of this overly concerned me, though, as I have good anchor gear and the knowledge to deploy it.

In fact, I wasn’t even concerned when Carolyn (who was bailing the dinghy astern) pointed forward and said, “White squall!”

As the 38-knot gusts hit us and visibility dropped to zero, I stood in the middle of my deck just forward of the mainmast and surveyed my whole world. It looked good despite the zooming currents and serrated dangers that surrounded us.

The white squall receded and the wind dropped back to 20 knots. Visibility returned, and I puffed up my chest just a tiny bit, proud of my boat and its gear. “Fatty!” shouted Carolyn from the dinghy. “The padded backrest from the kayak washed overboard! I can still see it in the current. Can I go?” “Sure,” I said automatically.

Lorraine stood next to me as Carolyn cast off, cranked up our 5-horsepower outboard and roared away.

“Bastard!” said Lorraine, as she pretended to slap my head. “Sending your wife into danger for a cushion!”

“Danger is her middle name,” I said dryly. “Besides, she’s a sailor as much as a wife, and that backrest is worth 20  bucks!”

At that point, everything was perfect. I was master of my universe, my ­vessel and my marriage. Then, in a moment of panic, I saw that the squall line was coming back, and more intense than  ever.

What happened next occurred in freeze frame: Carolyn zoomed for the backrest, waves building, winds gusting. The bow of Carolyn’s dinghy ­pointed up and began to fly away. There was Carolyn with her long hair. And there was the spinning prop and the over-revving airborne engine. It was spinning, spinning, spinning, and then disappeared upside down into the white wall of the squall.

I dived into the cockpit and hit Ganesh’s starter button. The Perkins M92B sprang to life.

“Do not let her out of your sight!” I shouted at Lorraine. She later told me she couldn’t see the kayak 10 feet away, let alone Carolyn 200 yards astern. “Shai,” I said while dashing forward, “I’ll need you to grab a boat hook and make sure my anchor chain doesn’t  pile.”

“Aye-aye,” he replied, already in ­motion.

Because of the strong current and 40-knot gusts, Ganesh reared wildly at the end of the anchor rode. I had to be careful not to get a windlass jam. Every second was precious. Carolyn’s life was in danger. I had zero visibility, and there was no time to find a chart.

Beset by dangers, I risked it all, without even making the decision to do so.

“The anchor’s off the bottom,” I screamed to Shai, as we were pelted by rain that felt heavy as hail. “You finish!”

Back aft, I snatched off the compass cover as I rammed the Perkins into gear. The wind howled too loud for me to hear the engine, but the tach read 2,000 rpm.

The trick was to find Carolyn amid the white murk before we ran aground. Ahead I saw circular ringlets of water emerging, and threw the helm over to starboard. The tip of a razor-sharp rock slithered by to port, and I shivered.

“There!” shouted Lorraine. “I see the upturned prop. It’s white, right?”

“Carolyn?” I asked.

“No,” Lorraine said. “The prop.”

I zigged and zagged, and tried to form a logical search pattern, but with ­visibility at only yards ahead, a strong current, and severe gusts, it was ­impossible.

“There she is!” screamed both Shai and Lorraine at the same instant, pointing off the port bow.

Carolyn had on only her panties and bra, and sat atop the overturned dinghy, calmly scraping the barnacles off its bottom with an oar — never one to sit idle while work was about. I smiled. “That’s my girl!”

“Shai,” I said briskly, “I’ll take her on my leeward side. You concentrate on getting Carolyn aboard, but be careful not to slip on the varnished cap rail. Lorraine, you focus on the dinghy. If I get that painter or dinghy cover wrapped in my prop, we’re doomed.”

I managed to fully stop just to windward of Carolyn, and took Ganesh out of gear so the propeller couldn’t cut her if she came in contact with it. Shai lifted her aboard, but when she grabbed for the lifelines, she missed and started to fall backward, as if pole-axed. Lorraine grabbed her and wrestled her on deck.

Then, instantly, there was giddy camaraderie, the sort that only real danger, survived, can birth. Each of us bear-hugged a dripping Carolyn, then hugged each other, all while jabbering away excitedly, going over each detail of the rescue again and again and again.

We weren’t just friends any longer; we were a crew forged in fire.

Later that evening, Carolyn and I lay on our backs in the warm sands of a dark hong. We stared straight up at the star-studded night sky and said little. Eventually, there was a ghostly glow on the eastern ridge of the hong, and then a fat full moon peered over the edge of the crater and light poured down on us.

We held our breath. Then Carolyn smiled in the darkness and said, “Thanks for rescuing me.”

“Us,” I said. “I rescued us.”

– – –

Cap’n Fatty and Carolyn can’t seem to get enough of Asia, and have decided to stay another year. “The beauty of having no plan is you don’t have to change it,” quipped Carolyn.

The post Hung up in Thailand appeared first on Cruising World.

James Bond Island, Thailand

James Bond Island, Thailand

angkor-thom,-cambodia.jpg

Cave entrance, Thailand

Floating market, Thailand

Thai anchorage

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Inside cave, Thailand

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Longtail boat, Thailand

Macaque monkey, Thailand

Marine park, Thailand

Petroglyphs, Thailand

Thailand

Thailand

The post Adventure Charter: Thailand 2014 appeared first on Cruising World.

Thailand

It’s a surreal land, so phantasmagorical as to make someone want to pinch herself to see if she’s dreaming. Gilded temples and giant statues of the Buddha adorn misty islands afloat upon jade-colored seas. Eagles circle peaks; herons fish from caves; dolphins glide through pellucid waters. Peculiar plants that might’ve been drawn from the imagination of Dr. Seuss and bizarre amphibious creatures live among the islands’ jungle-filled gullies and fissures. This heavenly place in Thailand is Phuket’s great bay, Ao Phang-Nga.

Over the past months, my husband, Michael, and I had worked our way along the Strait of Malacca from Singapore on our 47-foot Colin Childs steel ketch, Sea Quest; we’d been careful to hug the Malaysian coastline to remain out of reach of opportunistic Indonesian pirates. Our anticipation of reaching this fabled cruising ground heightened when we received word that our daughter would be flying in from the United States bringing along two of our grandchildren. Although by the time we reached Phuket in June it was already the season of the southwest monsoon, we intended to give the family a cruising experience that they’d long remember.

Having not experienced the southwest monsoon in Thailand ourselves, and thus unsure of what to expect, we were reassured to note that among the hundreds of islands of Ao Phang-Nga, several of them in the bay were large enough to afford protection in a blow.

Before departing with our daughter, Marina Batham, and the two 10-year-old cousins (Connor Batham, our son’s son, and Marina’s daughter, Sophia Simon), we first introduced them to Thai culture. We toured the exotic countryside, where under a temple’s upturned eaves, the children lit incense and, at the direction of a saffron-robed monk, applied tiny squares of gold leaf to Buddha statues. They climbed to the colossal 45-meter-high Buddha of Wat Chalong, which offers a view across the harbors and beaches of Phuket. Then in answer to Connor and Sophia’s passionate hope that they might ride an elephant, we found some of the massive pachyderms at a wildlife park, where the children were soon swaying upon the back of a gentle giant lumbering through the shade of a rubber plantation.

| |Batham grandchildren swim off Sea Quest at an anchorage near Ko Dam Hok.|

When the sun was low and the sting was out of the heat, we roamed the town of Ao Chalong among throngs of happy, convivial Thai people. Families sated appetites in the aroma-scented night market, selecting from a vast variety of red-hot spicy food or snacking on roasted grasshoppers and grubs, which, understandably, the American children eschewed for the more familiar fried chicken.

We sailed from Ao Chalong on a brisk breeze that gave us a fast trip to Ko Mai Thon, just seven miles away. Anchoring us amid a fleet of Thai fishing craft, Michael then took the kids ashore to run off steam chasing seabirds and picking up wondrous bits of flotsam and sea shells, all strange to their eyes. But there was too much swell for a peaceful night’s sleep, so we put to sea again, setting a course to the much larger island of Ko Phi Phi Don, 22 miles to the east.

Downwind, under main and genoa, Sea Quest kept up a good pace, sliding through the Phi Phi Leh channel in the fading light of evening. Sophia and Connor, both of whom had quickly recovered from an earlier bout of seasickness, spent the entire passage gaily chattering on the windward rail. Neither yet realized the many generations of salt water that ran in their veins or just how strong the influence of those seagoing ancestors might yet prove to be. Marina was no neophyte either. She’d crewed with us on a passage across the Coral Sea from Australia to New Caledonia a decade earlier. Later, just after she and Mark Simon had married, they cruised for eight months with us though the western Pacific Ocean.

In near darkness, we tucked into Ko Phi Phi Don to drop anchor under cliffs looming darkly against a quarter moon. A mile away, numerous tourist boats bobbed off the main beaches from which amplified music boomed long into the night. Morning’s peaceful quiet revealed a breathtaking wall of dragon-toothed peaks and handkerchief-sized beaches. As we approached one beach, a tribe of monkeys materialized out of the jungle, advancing curiously as our dinghy grounded.

The macaques the children had earlier encountered at the “monkey school” back in Ao Chalong had been trained from babyhood to have manners. Wild macaques had no such manners! To prevent these engaging animals from climbing over us and possibly biting, we had to force them to back off with a splash of water or a handful of tossed sand. They seemed used to visitors and demanded food. But after our rebuff, they sat nearby, pouting like spoiled children, until their playmates diverted them into a game of tag. A female clutching an almost hairless newborn slung close to her chest walked nonchalantly past the cavorting youngsters to climb into a tree to nurse.

I stepped forward to try for a camera shot through branches. A male monkey moved closer and eyed me, giving me a warning. Threateningly, another also advanced. I was already stepping back when a sharp bark rang out a signal! Instantly, the tribe descended on me like an army of Lilliputian soldiers, grabbing my legs and pulling at my clothes. Alarmed and holding my camera high, I leaped backward into knee-deep water.

| |The visiting crew included Sophia Simon (left), Marina Batham (center), and Connor Batham (right), who befriended a monkey en route.|

The weather pinned us down in Ko Phi Phi Don. When it lifted, we set off on the 20-mile sail to Ko Dam Hok, known also by the moniker Chicken Island, which the rock formation on its south end resembles. With the bright gennaker gaily set, we enjoyed smooth sailing until the clouds morphed from white to leaden gray to an ominous bruised purple while the water churning under our keel strangely brightened to luminescent jade. An early gust from the oncoming squall overpowered the old gennaker, ripping it from leech to luff, its torn remnants streaming ahead like circus pennants. By midafternoon, with the squall gone as quickly as it’d come, we dropped anchor near tourist boats in a picture-perfect cerulean lagoon over which towered a giant pinnacle of rock.

Connor and Sophia launched their paddleboard while we enjoyed a steaming cup of tea. But the mood was shattered when a strong gust of wind sent the teacups flying. Connor and Sophia, having noticed another advancing squall, had hastily relaunched their paddleboard off the beach to return to_ Sea Quest._ However, the force of the ensuing gusts capsized them. The kids, now in deep water, sensibly clung to the overturned paddleboard as Michael drove the dinghy to the rescue. Sheeting rain masked the now-deserted beach. Nearby islands disappeared into the gloom. This anchorage, so peaceful just an hour earlier, was no longer safe. The bay’s towering rock pinnacle was causing the wind to accelerate to over 40 knots. As repeated williwaws swept the bay, a nearby fishing boat hastily hauled in his anchor. We followed suit.

Well away from williwaw-producing mountains, the local boat anchored among other fishing boats. We joined them and were rewarded with a reasonable night’s sleep. Early next morning, we relocated to a spot off a nearby sandy isthmus to swim over reefs abounding in parrotfish and red corals.

Later, however, we moved back to the spectacular anchorage from which we’d been blown from the day before. To entertain the kids, Michael rigged the boom we use to hoist the dinghy as a swing so they could catapult into the sea—a strenuous game they kept up for an hour or more. Unwilling, however, to spend another night under the gust-prone rock, we set sail for the Ko Hong island group, in Krabi province, 12 miles distant. Along the way, Connor and Sophia practiced seaman’s knots, soon learning to tie clove hitches, bowlines, rolling hitches, and sheet bends. The weather seemed more settled now. When_ Sea Quest_ dropped anchor, she lay peacefully floating in a pool of ever-changing shades of green—soft turquoise over the sunlit sandy bottom, almost black where the waves undercut the high cliffs. A graceful curtain of water droplets, like a jeweled veil, fell from the limestone stalactites on the cliff walls.

In delightful anticipation, Connor and Sophia had the paddleboard launched in a flash. They were seen disappearing under the curtain of drops into a deep fissure that suggested a secret cave, or what in Thai is called a hong. We followed in the dinghy. The hong‘s inner walls were stained with black and red oxides in a fantasy of forms. Under a cave-like overhang, ribbon-festooned Thai fishing boats were moored, their crews napping away the daylight hours in the cool shade. We paddled quietly, birdcalls and nature’s sounds enveloping us in serenity. The primordial pool was a nursery for thousands of glinting fish, creating a hunting ground for cobalt-plumaged kingfishers and a home for hundreds of palm-sized starfish sprinkled across the sandy bottom like reflections of the night sky.

Aboard the boat, we’d fallen into a comfortable domestic routine. By the time the crew emerged sleepily from their bunks, Michael would have ready stacks of pancakes, bacon, and tropical fruit. The BBC world news crackled over the airways. Later, we switched to the local FM station to catch the quaint sound of Westminster chimes followed by a gentle female voice intoning, “It is now eight o’clock in the Kingdom of Thailand!” Then Thai voices sang the national anthem. When we’d peek on deck, an inconceivable landscape worthy of a science-fiction fantasy would greet us: vertical islands towering above their narrow bases, pinnacles standing like obelisks, the razor-back ridges of blade-like islands split almost to sea level, and, as far as the eye could see into the haze of Asia, a beguiling verdant land.

| |Connor Batham took to the swing set up by his grandfather, Michael Batham, for hours of flying into the water.|

Where we next dropped anchor, the strong currents flowing between the halves of an eroded island spooked Connor and Sophia a little, so I claimed the paddleboard for myself. The hong here consisted of a deep-water bay, the far side pierced through with a sea cave. Poking along the sheer rock walls, I noticed a dark, surging tunnel redolent with the smell of weed and sea creatures. Just a hint of light in the gloom tempted me to go farther. Letting my eyes adjust, I slid between overhanging rocks to enter a dimly lit pool. The family had to tip and wiggle the dinghy to fit its larger bulk through the tight passage. High overhead, a bird, complaining, fluttered from his roost.

This hong, like others throughout the archipelago, was formed by water eroding the porous limestone constituting the islands. Like cavities in a rotten tooth, large caverns were created that eventually collapsed, exposing the chambers to the sky. The one in which we floated was flooded from wall to wall. However, it led on through a rock-strewn tunnel into yet another, which, with its gloomy walls and gray water, emerged into view like the spooky swamp setting from The Lord of the Rings.

Surprised by our approach, a dragon-like four-foot monitor lizard splashed into the water and swam out of sight. Connor and Sophia were eager to follow it into a farther hong, but the dinghy wouldn’t fit. So the two of them slipped onto the paddleboard and bravely set off alone through the dark tunnel into a creepy, real-life place that the denizens of Disneyland can only dream of conjuring up to frighten city-dwelling children.

In calm weather, we wound our way close along the shores of the many islands, basking in their unusual beauty. Through the heat of the day, we watched tourists from passenger ferries climb into inflatable canoes to be escorted into the hongs by guides. Fortunately, by late afternoon, the uninhabited islands became deserted and their wildlife cautiously emerged.

The upper reaches of Phang-Nga bay are intersected by channels through mudflats. The water is opaque here. Several times Sea Quest squelched into the soft mud as we searched for depth along our way. Thai long-tailed boats manned by Muslim couples fished the bay. One stopped near. “Sawasdee krap!” they cried, calling out the Thai greeting while offering up dripping prawns from their sloshing bilge. Anticipating a tasty gourmet meal, we paid the asking price—about double the town rate, we later learned. But oh, were they ever fresh!

As expected, Ko Khao Phing Kan, otherwise known as James Bond Island after being featured in The Man with the Golden Gun, was a crowded tourist hub. However, Connor and Sophia, exhibiting symptoms of that modern malaise, shopping-mall withdrawal, were keen to get a fix. They’d worked hard to earn cash for their trip, but they’d been whisked off into a wilderness before they could spend any of it! Passenger-carrying long-tailed boats, with exposed propellers whirling dangerously at the ends of long shafts, jostled us for space to land on the tiny beach. Multicolored souvenir stands formed a gauntlet to run for those tourists more interested in scenery than trinkets. Michael and I dropped off Marina and the kids and retreated out of the way, promising to return later to pick them up. In the dinghy, we circled the island’s pair of sugarloaf peaks and the iconic tower of rock featured in the movie.

| |The region’s clouds can morph quickly from white to leaden gray and then, in squalls, to an ominous bruised purple. During one such burst, Sea Quest‘s gennaker was ripped from leech to luff.|

The now-sated children returned to the boat clutching their haul of souvenirs. With only inches under Sea Quest‘s keel, we eventually nosed our way to the fairy-tale scenery of the Ko Raya group of islands. Our skipper was suffering a headache from dehydration the next morning, so Marina and I took charge, launching the dinghy to search for a remarkable cave we’d seen mentioned in a particular guidebook.

Word is that if you’re lucky enough to visit these islands before 1000 or after 1600, when you have the place to yourselves, you’ll be unable to locate the hidden hongs on your own. Most are invisible unless you know exactly where to look, and then you have to muster up the courage to wind your way blindly into the darkness. In our case, it took some careful searching of the coastline, but eventually we hauled up on a gloomy beach smelling of the dung of the bats and swallows that flitted overhead. Inside the shadowy cave, we found a shrine in the elaborate shape of a mosque. Although it’s usual to find Buddhist and sometimes even Taoist shrines in awe-inspiring places, we’d never before seen Muslims make a shrine like this.

We headed south again, this time setting a course to the honeycombed island of Ko Phanak. Without a careful watch on the comings and goings of the tourist boats, however, it’s doubtful we’d have discovered the sea-level passages that led to the secret open-air chambers of the island’s interior. We found them to be havens for wildlife in the hours around dawn and dusk. Monkeys came down from the cliffs to frolic on the sand, sea eagles wheeled overhead, kingfishers darted past in a flash of color, and spectacular butterflies rode sunbeams. At our feet sat amphibious mudskippers fanning out blue-spotted dorsal fins in a courting ritual. The more soberly clad females shyly observed this display with bright eyes comically rotating on stalks. Overhead, awkward-looking black and white male hornbills supporting ridiculously large beaks announced their presence with a rasping cackle before flying to another branch, followed closely by their mates.
Our family cruise was winding to a close, and the weather was again deteriorating. We decided to take shelter on Ko Phuket, at Ao Po, close to the airport. As the visitors packed up and made ready to leave the boat, Sophia enthusiastically claimed that her favorite memory was swinging out over the water on the end of the dinghy boom.

“That,” she exclaimed, was “real cool!” Conner’s close encounter with the unknown, especially with wild monkeys, had also left him in raptures. “I want to be a skipper when I grow up so I can do more of this cruising sort of thing,” he said. We also discovered that he nurses a secret aspiration to write. I found a crumpled page from his notebook, a first attempt, he told me, at a cruising article. It read, complete with his creative spellings: “If your familey wants to go some ware go to Thailand, Phuket. It is cool for the kids. Fun playses to go like Phi Phi. There is beutiful snorkeling. You can feed monkies, kayak, ride elefants, and many more fun things. Lots of fun for the parents to. So come on down to Phuket, Thailand!” He’d added his byline at the end: Connor Batham.

We hadn’t realized how astonishing the islands would prove themselves to be, so full of encounters to fire the children’s imaginations. They’d climbed, paddled, snorkeled, learned seamanship, and, in squalls, had even capsized on the paddleboard and kept their heads. They’d proved their courage and resourcefulness. Phang-Nga bay had indelibly imprinted itself in the children’s memories and met everyone’s highest expectations, all in a land beyond belief.

What we didn’t at that moment realize was that this trip would be our swan-song voyage aboard Sea Quest. Soon after the departure of Marina and the children, Michael and I decided that we were ready to return home. We’d lived and cruised aboard Sea Quest for 18 years, sailing the farthest reaches of the Pacific in the great triangle extending from New Zealand to French Polynesia to Japan, including a five-year side trip into Southeast Asia. Our wanderlust finally sated, we were ready to hang up our watch caps and in the future ride the roiling seas and the heaving horizons only in our dreams.

After tens of thousands of miles and countless Pacific and Asian landfalls, the Bathams sold Sea Quest in Malaysia and are making a go of living ashore in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. They sail their daysailer Wakatere for a week at a time, fishing for their dinners and still getting a kick out of life.

The post Thailand Fantasy appeared first on Cruising World.

Seawind cats

In early October, after undergoing a business restructuring in its base south of Sydney, Australia, Seawind Catamarans announced that going forward, the company would likely be building its entire line of award-winning cats in Vietnam.

In making the announcement, Seawind’s managing director Richard Ward said, “This year has been the most challenging in the 30 years I have been in business, however I have been humbled by the support of our suppliers and would like to offer my thanks to give Seawind this opportunity to move forward and focus on the next 30 years of building great multihulls.” Ward added that high manufacturing costs, and the ongoing strength of the Australian dollar—which put Seawind at a competitive disadvantage with many imported models—would necessitate the closing of the firm’s Australian production facility located in Wollongong.

Ward said Seawind would continue to offer after sales service and warranty support for future and existing Seawind owners in Australia and around the world, either directly from Seawind itself or through Multihull Central, whose headquarters are in the purpose-built multihull marina of Rozelle Bay on Sydney Harbor.

Following the completion of the last three Seawind 1250’s on order, future production of the Seawind 1250 will likely move to the Seawind/Corsair Marine facility in Vietnam, where the Seawind 1000XL2 and Seawind 1160 are already being built alongside the range of high performance Corsair trimarans and the Corsair 50 catamaran. Corsair Marine, originally based in California, has been producing boats for the last six years in Vietnam.

The accompanying photo shows an imported Seawind 1160, built in Vietnam, after launching in Sydney’s Botany Bay shipping terminal. For more information, visit www.seawindcats.com.

The post Seawind Cats Sails Onward appeared first on Cruising World.

It’s estimated that between 250 and 300 yachts transit the Torres Strait, north of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula, every year. Heading west from there, most boats normally stop at Darwin, Australia. According to official records, 69 yachts cleared into Darwin in 2010, not including 70 foreign boats that joined the Sail Indonesia Rally in Darwin, which attracted a total of 106 boats, of which 36 were Australian.

Indonesia saw a record 615 visiting yachts, which is the number of cruising permits, or Cruising Application for Indonesian Territory, that were issued in 2010 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Bali, Indonesia, is an important cruising hub and gateway into the Indian Ocean, and most west-bound boats stop there, regardless of whether they are planning to continue through Southeast Asia and the Red Sea or take the Cape of Good Hope route.

A total of 220 boats stopped at Bali Marina, of which approximately half continued into the southern Indian Ocean. The nearest stops along this route are the two Australian outposts, Christmas Island, which saw 27 arrivals, and the more popular Cocos Islands (Keeling Islands) with 69. From there, the route splits into a northern branch leading to the Chagos Archipelago, and a southern branch to Mauritius, east of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. Mauritius recorded 174 arrivals, among which 49 boats were described as local traffic as most had sailed over from neighboring Réunion. On the northern route, Chagos was visited by 105 yachts.

The larger than usual number that called at Chagos, a British territory, was due to an influx of boats that were originally bound for the Red Sea but had changed their plans at short notice because of the increased threat of piracy. As a result, 2010 was the first year when more boats appeared to have taken the Cape of Good Hope, Africa, route than to have sailed across the northern Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and Suez Canal.

For those who prefer to sail the until-now more common route, Phuket, in Thailand, and Langkawi, in Malaysia, are the favorite places to prepare for the crossing of the northern Indian Ocean. Yacht Haven Marina in Phuket deals with most foreign visitors and the manager estimated in 2010 that the total of foreign-flagged boats was 250, while Langkawi attracted around 150 yachts.

As some of those boats called at both places, it’s assumed that approximately 300 to 350 long-distance cruising boats pass through Southeast Asia every year. About one half of those boats used to sail to the Mediterranean Sea in the past, but that figure is now closer to one quarter.

The most popular ports of call along the northern route are Galle, in Sri Lanka, where 79 boats called in 2010, while the Maldives were visited by 98 and Mumbai, in India, saw 36.

In recent years, many of the boats bound for the Red Sea called first in the Middle East at Salalah in Oman, to join convoys and sail from there in company through the critical area in the Gulf of Aden.

A good indication of movement in the Indian Ocean is the number of transits through the Suez Canal, where the northbound traffic has been going down in the last few years. Numbers also show that approximately 200 boats sailed the Cape of Good Hope route in 2010. This estimate is based on statistics obtained from two key sources: Cape Town, South Africa, and St. Helena. The various yachts clubs and marinas in the Cape Town area recorded a total of 121 visiting yachts during 2010. Because of St. Helena’s strategic location in the South Atlantic, few yachts bypass the island without stopping. The 169 yachts that called at St. Helena show an increase over the 137 arrivals in 2006.

Read more of Jimmy Cornell’s “Where We Explore.”

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Cap’n Fatty Goodlander

Anchored off Nukualofa, Tonga, we were attempting to figure out what delicious thing to do after lunch. That’s a reoccurring problem for us. We sincerely want to treat ourselves a little bit better every day—which isn’t easy, after a lifetime adrift from the Corporate Clock. We have no schedule, no boss, no job. Each second we live is entirely our own—to cherish or squander. My buddy Webb Chiles says we sailors are “artists of the wind.” I like that lofty, slightly daft concept. It makes me grin. But my ultimate focus is more on cruising than sailing. So perhaps I’m an artist of time.

“What’s on the menu for this afternoon?” says my wife, Carolyn, with a yawn. “Should we be good little sailors and restitch the headsail sun cover or head ashore for some decadence?”

“Decadence, definitely,” I said. “Better yet, let’s get artsy-fartsy!”

She grinned. She was into it. “I’ll get my hat,” she said happily.

With 10 feet of beam and weighing 13,000 pounds empty, Wild Card is a small, relatively light 38-foot vessel. There’s barely room for us. Most of what we have aboard are tools, a term I use in the broadest sense: My computer, Carolyn’s bike, and our life raft are all tools in one form or another. And we’re not terribly material people. My subscription to GQ lapsed years ago. Carolyn spends more time poring over the Budget Marine catalog than flipping the pages of Vogue. But there’s one thing we do collect as we go: local art.

Admittedly, we’re not like the Mellons, buying million-dollar paintings and donating them to the National Gallery of Art, in our nation’s capital. We’re a bit more casual and laid-back. We often buy items in the $5 to $10 range. We’re fuzzy with the line between art and craft—who cares, really, if the piece emotionally touches you? Our gallery is small. It consists of the main bulkhead of our boat. Our collection rotates. Some items have been on display for a decade; a few only last a week or two before being brought down in disgrace.

Art isn’t straightforward. Neither is collecting it. We like to meet the artist and see where he or she works. Often, the studio is the shaded area beneath a palm tree. Many have a single tool: an old pocketknife, or a battered paintbrush. I enjoy woodworking, so it’s only natural that I’m particularly interested in woodcarvings.

We don’t really have a clue what we’re doing. We haven’t formalized our collection or locked ourselves into any single concept. Carolyn loves to buy me opium pipes. I dig knives and swords. But we’re open to anything. I’m enthralled with our death masks from Papua New Guinea; our cannibal fork from Fiji; our carved marlinspikes from Niuatoputapu.

Weapons are interesting: Every tiny dot means something to the chalk-dusted Aborigine who carved my outback boomerang.

In Tonga’s Ha’apai Group, we came across a weather-bound fishing vessel whose ancient skipper made carvings upon the swords of the swordfish he caught. I asked him about the mystical figures dancing within.

“This is a swordfish, and this is a sailfish, and this is an alpha male,” he said without a blink. I thought to myself, where did he get “alpha male” from?
“Beautiful,” I said.

“Twenty bucks,” he said.

“Would you consider $20, a small sack of rice, and a warm six-pack of beer?” I counter-offered.

“Twist my arm,” he said in agreement.

The more primitive the art, the better. I particularly enjoy our African carvings, representations of strange, tall people with oddly misshaped features and twisted skulls carved in ebony by nearly mute jungle folk who look exactly that way.

One piece I purchased from the animists of Indonesia was so powerful that I couldn’t keep it on the bulkhead. I’m not sure how to describe it; that it gave off an “invisible heat” is the best I can do. I took it down almost immediately. But it screamed out to me from the bilge, too. I eventually had to send it to the most powerful spiritual person I know in America, who now keeps it under three mattresses in the basement.

Art has power. Why else would sensible people pay millions for some paint-smeared canvas in a wooden frame?

Culture plays an important part. The Thais are in search of tranquillity, hence their Buddha is serene. The Chinese, on the other hand, were scared and starving to death; hence their Buddha is fat and happy.

Perhaps part of my obsession with art stems from the fact that my father was a commercial artist and sign painter by trade, and both my sisters have sold many of their paintings. My sister Gale, in fact, is married to James A. Whitbeck, a New England artist. Me? I can’t draw a bath.

I guess the point I’m trying to make with all of the above is that sailing the world isn’t just about sailing the world; it’s about living and loving it as you do so.
Carolyn and I are richer in time than even the Mellons, so why shouldn’t we spend a bit of it as they do? The joy we receive while doing so far outweighs the slight monetary costs.

Good artists are often generous in their praise of other artists. One thing often leads to another. So we adjust our whimsical course accordingly and thus meet the tattooist of Moorea, the pearl carver of Makemo, the basket weaver of Vava’u.

“Why are you here?” asked a maker of traditional fishing lures on a tiny island in the vast Pacific Ocean.

“Because you are,” we replied. “We heard about you in Tahiti. We viewed some of your work there. It was only a couple of hundred miles out of our way, so we thought we’d drop by, and we’re happy we did.”

If we didn’t collect art, we’d never have realized that the State of Yap in Micronesia is the only place in the Pacific that’s head-over-heels in love with macramé. Why? We still haven’t puzzled that out, although we’ve been asking for years.

But on this particular day in Tonga, we climbed the hot stairs above the teeming Nuku’alofa market and chatted with our favorite local carver once again. I was attempting to resist his pièce de résistance, a magnificently carved Tongan war club. It was too expensive and too heavy. I couldn’t possibly.
Then he pointed out the strange little Polynesian guy doing a haka on the shaft and the fact that the string on the handle grip wasn’t commercially made; it was woven locally out of coconut-husk fibers.

Gosh, it was lovely.

I looked over at Carolyn. She smiled her agreement and encouragement. We walked out US$88 lighter, but with the war club tossed casually over one happy shoulder.

The moment that we returned to Wild Card, I gave it pride of place on the bulkhead.

“Happy now?” Carolyn asked.

“Yes, very happy,” I smiled. “And I’ll never forget today. The French are right, the word souvenir really does mean ‘memory.’”

Cap’n Fatty Goodlander’s latest book, Red Sea Run: Two Sailors in a Sea of Trouble, is now available from Amazon.com.

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phillipines

Cruising in the Philippines isn’t easy. Example: Only February is considered to be (almost) hurricane-free. The Philippines is an adventurous, death-defying destination. But a wrathful Mother Nature is only part of the problem. Government corruption is rampant. Social justice either doesn’t exist or is sold to the highest bidder. Crime is everywhere: Pickpockets bump into each other while attempting to rip you off. Nothing is quite as simple as it seems in the Philippines. It’s easy to find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time-and just as easy, as well, to discover earthly delights. We did both. Almost immediately.

I like to sail-where to isn’t terribly important to me. Thus my wife, Carolyn, and I have worked out a nice division of labor over the last four decades of cruising together: If I can say “Let’s go!” whenever I want to, she can pick our next destination.

This works perfectly for us because I’m a sailor who likes to travel and Carolyn is a traveler who likes to sail. Or, to put it another way, the voyage is my destination, while the landfall is her main focus.

And we’d just spent a year cruising in the waters surrounding tiny, pristine, and nearly deserted Pacific islands. So Carolyn felt that we needed a cultural change of pace. “Let’s return to Southeast Asia,” she said, “where we can afford both the rice and the water!”

“Fine,” I said, “but let’s not retrace our steps through Indonesia. Let’s go through Micronesia and the Philippines.

“Agreed,” she said.

So that was our basic float plan. But then, in Yap, an island in the Federated States of Micronesia, we happened to bump into an old friend, David Willard, of the British yacht Celtic Caper. We’d previously met David in the Maldives, Chagos, and Mayotte during our Indian Ocean days. We had a lot in common, namely, that we were repeat offenders: He was on his third circumnavigation, and we were on our second. But David had spent a lot of quality time in the Philippines, and he immediately dissuaded us from visiting the northern Manila area. He suggested that we instead visit the island of Leyte because, he said, it was “the closest thing to paradise on Earth.”

“But isn’t that in the Mindanao group?” I asked. “Where in 2001 the Moro pirates kidnapped an entire resort and beheaded an American?”

“No,” he said. “Leyte is north of Mindanao. No problem!”

One of the secrets of successful cruising is to be flexible. Sure, it’s fine to make plans-if you don’t follow them. We’ve learned to go with the flow. If the wind-actual or political-veers, so do we.

“OK!” I said. “Leyte it is!”

It only took a week to cover the 1,000 miles of ocean between Yap and the Philippines. We could’ve done it faster, but I declined to crank up the engine-even when our boat speed dropped below three knots. At the outset, we had light winds, but they gradually built and veered northward as we approached the 7,000 islands that make up the country.

I had a good, sensible plan: Sail into the huge mouth of Surigao Strait and heave to for the night. Unfortunately, by this point we had reinforced trades of 28 knots with squalls gusting into the high 30s. The current was, to put it mildly, fair: We were hitting 10.2 knots during long, squiggly surfs as we approached Suluan Island. That was nice, sure, but I shuddered to think about what would occur when the tide changed.

As I said, I’d intended to sail up to the mouth of Surigao Strait and heave to until dawn. But heaving to in such massive seas-especially after the tidal current turned and humped them up even more-wasn’t ideal, so I decided to duck into the 15-mile-wide pass and search for a lee before the tide turned and we were unable to make any progress toward Maasin, Leyte. Thus we found ourselves unexpectedly screaming down the rollers of Surigao Strait in the middle of a pitch-black night while trying to find some shelter after a hard week at sea.

I eventually found calmer water along the western shore of Dinagat Island and ran off under bare poles. This reduced our speed to a mere 6 knots, which was still far faster than I wanted to go. I kept steering southward with one eye on my radar and the other peering into the night ink ahead.

All and all, we ended up about 40 miles south of where we’d expected to heave to. True to my long-term promise, I didn’t enter a strange harbor at night. Instead, I bided my time until dawn and waited until an enticing bay flashed by-and jibed into it on the spur of the moment. It was to be too deep for anchoring, so we powered into nearby Tagabaka Cove to find suitably shallow water.

We waved at the local fisherman. They didn’t wave back. In fact, they did nothing save gape at us as if we were an apparition. This surprised me. The Philippines aren’t as busy with yachts as, say, Thailand, but still, cruising sailboats aren’t exactly unfamiliar.

Why no wave? No smile? No nutt’n?

People here acted as if they’d never seen a yacht. In fact, they acted as if they’d never expected to see one! It was strange, very strange. We’d heard that the Filipino people were among the friendliest in the world-and yet these people weren’t just unfriendly. They were, well, sullen.

“It’s as if nobody wants to smile at us or wave to us or be nice to us,” I joked with Carolyn, “because, you know, they have to kill us later in the evening!”

And since we hadn’t cleared in yet and this wasn’t an official port of entry, we couldn’t go ashore to ingratiate ourselves. So we just tried to be nice to the gathering, gawking fishermen until weariness finally over came us and we fell into our bunks.

When I awoke, my wife/navigator/lover of 38 years and more than 100,000 miles was already reading her Lonely Planet guidebook. “Tell me about this place,” I said as I stirred my strong, black Tongan coffee.

“I’m trying,” she said, “but I’ve searched and searched the whole Visayan section and can’t seem to find it. Maasin is there, sure, but no Dinagat.”

“Try the index,” I said, and the next thing I heard from her was a woosh of inhaled air and silence. “Well?” I said. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Mindanao,” she said.

“Mindanao what?” I said.

“We’re in Mindanao,” she said.

I won’t go into all the historical detail of why Muslim Mindanao has chafed for centuries under Christian Filipino rule, but it has-since the 13th century. In fact, this is the spiritual birthplace of the modern suicide bomber: For centuries, Mindanao would send “suicide swordsmen” into crowds of milling Christians to hack away until killed. Let’s put it another way: Mindanao still has a well-deserved worldwide reputation for being “yacht unfriendly.” Don’t get me wrong: I’m not anti-Islamic. We’ve spent delightful years cruising in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Maldives.

“We couldn’t really be in Mindanao, could we?” Carolyn said.
“Don’t joke,” I chided her.

“This island is clearly labeled ‘Dinagat’ on the chart, ‘a small island off the coast of Mindanao and part of the Mindanao group,'” she said glumly, and then pointed straight out the companionway. “In fact, that large bluish island right there is, well, Mindanao!”

It took awhile for it to soak in. When I wake up after a deep sleep, I’m sorta slow. But I soon realized that she wasn’t kidding. It was true. That’s part of the problem with using modern electronic charts: They’re great at zooming in for vivid inshore detail but lousy at zooming out for the big picture. We’d already violated the one rule of cruising in the Philippines: Avoid strife-torn Mindanao, home of the Moro pirates.

“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” I blurted.

“Actually, Fatty, it isn’t,” Carolyn said without missing a beat, and looking me right in the eye. “You’ve done lots of other far stupider things, just not lately.”

Ah, the clever wench, she knew there was no time for me to rebut!

Carolyn said this at 1022 and by 1030 Wild Card, our modest, 38-foot S&S-designed sloop, had herself fireballing out of the harbor at hull speed, while her anchor was still dripping with thick clumps of Moro mud. The tide was wrong. It was raining. The seas were huge. We weren’t properly stowed.

“The hell with it!” I giggled and savagely punched Wild Card’s bow straight into a large, bounding roller that swept our entire foredeck. Then I said gleefully to Carolyn, “Safe at sea again!”

That was our first taste of the Philippines-a bitter one. And, understandably, it made us a tad paranoid.

So did all the pirate watchtowers that dotted the coast at every village and atop every headland; for centuries, the Moro pirates regularly raided Philippine towns. Any hearty survivors were then carried off and sold as durable slaves. Just the mention of “Moro pirates” strikes terror into many modern Filipinos; in fact, they’re still threatened with them as “boogie men” during childhood. I try to ignore such grim, violent histories but it isn’t easy, especially when the watchtowers are still standing silent sentry.

Two days later, we anchored off Maasin at dusk. By the time we got Wild Card squared away, it was pitch black. Normally, we’d just wait until dawn to go ashore, but Carolyn wanted to wash away her fear with a cold beer-and what Carolyn wants, Carolyn gets.

As I mentioned, it was a dark night. We soon found ourselves in the dinghy searching for a place to come ashore off the town. But the squatter shacks were dense-we couldn’t see anywhere to land. Then a small beach appeared, crammed with local fishing craft. I beached our dinghy and immediately the hair on the back of my head stood up in silent alarm. Sleeping bodies-some from inside the canoes and some from the fly-infested sand itself-started rising up like weightless ghosts. They were men; toothless, shirtless, shoeless, dirty men.
The smell of rotting fish made me want to gag. There was no electric light, only a faint sliver of moon to see by, and they slowly milled around us, silently circling like sharks. I didn’t know what to do. I could push Carolyn rudely back into the dinghy and attempt to escape before they could attack, but it seemed too late for that. I didn’t have a clear, quick path back to sea. We were surrounded.

Suddenly, the largest one stood before me. He brought up his arms. I flinched. Then his iron arms wound around me and tightened into a fierce grip of the heartiest friendship.

“Don’t worry!” he said. “We are brothers of the sea! Our home is your home. We always take good care of our passing yachties. We will watch your dinghy and keep an eye on your anchored vessel. While we sleep, you will do the same for us. There are no thieves here-we drown ’em! No one will hurt you or your woman.
Welcome!”

They were the men of the Tao Gama, a brotherhood of dirt poor but proud Filipino fishermen. “Our brotherhood isn’t against anyone or anything. It’s just for us,” explained their leader, Sumaya. “As individuals, we’re vulnerable, but we have strength as a group. We pool our fish, our labor, and our collective money. We’re all for one and one for all. If one of us gets sick, no matter-he still gets his fair share of our catch. We’ve vowed that it will be so. We’ve sworn it so. With blood. We’re not just friends, we’re brothers. Brothers of the sea. Brothers of the Tao Gama!”

They lived rough lives in a warren of squatters shacks shoved haphazardly between the high-water mark and the main road. Their ramshackle living quarters might have been pictured in a tourist training film of what not to do and where not to go. There were a million dark nooks and crannies where knife-wielding assassins could easily hide in the shadows, ready to shove your dying body into the next odoriferous hovel.

The transit from beach to road was directly through a dozen shacks packed with humanity, each filled with dozing bodies, snoring daughters, sleeping mothers, napping wives, laughing girlfriends, and crying babies, not to mention strutting roosters, stray dogs, earless cats, and the ever-present grunting and rutting pigs!

At first, transiting this area scared me, but I was soon utterly enthralled. Nobody acted the least concerned that a foreigner had suddenly appeared in the living room. Anyone who was eating immediately lifted his or her bowl of food in sincere offering. I don’t think I ever passed through without turning down at least one meal of rice and fish scales, if nothing else. No matter what little they had, upon sight of me, they’d offer it.

“Coffee, Fatty?” They’d say. Or “We’re cooking up some pig intestines. Come back with Carolyn in an hour!”

The oldest man was named Ben Morie. He was brown as a nut, small in stature, and had huge bat-wing ears, and yet he presented a regal, commanding presence. He was also in his late 70s, and he’d regale us with stories of World War II and how nice the Japanese were to him during the occupation. His English was horrible-but he proudly sang the song “Born Free” with perfect diction in a lovely, loud, shack-quaking voice.

“Excellent!” I said when he first sang it for me. “Beautiful, Ben!”

From then on, every time we’d see each other, we’d burst into a Broadway-musical duet singing and dancing our way into the hearts of all concerned. (OK, a few did run off holding their ears in agony!)

Glen was the youngest full-fledged fisherman-and fascinated by my Casio Sea Pathfinder wristwatch. “How does it know that the tide is high?” He’d ask. “What is barometric pressure? It can’t really have a compass inside of it, can it? What do the beeps mean? What tells it the moon will soon be full?”

Bing Bing was their hero: The physically fit man had saved dozens of lives during a recent local landslide that had instantaneously buried 2,000 unlucky souls. Bing Bing had dug up the dying with his bare, bleeding hands “until the bones of his fingers showed through,” said his friend Ulding in awe.

While members of the Tao Gama fished in a variety of ways aboard a wide range of watercraft, they were collectively exploring a completely new method of catching fish. It required lots of teamwork, much physical stamina-and considerable danger. Yoyoy gathered the materials needed. Ciobard carved the wooden spear guns. Dono fashioned the swimming fins out of discarded plywood. Rico collected the inner tubes. Aping was in charge of, well, charging!

Here’s how it worked: they’d sleep all day, rise, eat, then drink among themselves a gallon of tuba, a bubbling brown coconut beer that looks and tastes like, well, never mind! Then they’d line up on the beach and don their homemade snorkel equipment, carved wooden goggles, plywood fins, and tree-limb spear guns. Once in the water, they’d trail a truck inner tube slung with a canvas bag in which to keep their catch.

The spear gun was custom carved to be fired with only one hand because the other held a crude but effective waterproofed motorcycle battery with a switchable halogen spotlight strapped to it. In the dark of night and amid the dirty swirling waters of the busy, traffic-filled commercial harbor, they’d dive down, swim along the bottom, and switch on the lamp. The moment a fish appeared to see what was going on, they’d shoot it between the eyes. Evidently, it worked, although I’ve never heard of anyone anywhere nocturnally spear fishing in such a strange manner; their evolving method was sort of a Tao Gama exclusive, I guess.

“But don’t you get run over by other vessels?” I asked. “Don’t you get entangled in discarded fishing line and bashed senseless into the frothing rocks?”

“Yes,” shrugged Edgar sadly, but then he brightened up. “But not too often!”

It’s difficult to convey how nice, kind, and solicitous they were to us. Every time Carolyn returned alone, they’d carry her heavily laden bags. Then they’d launch and hold the dinghy steady for her. They’d always tell us where to shop for the best prices, often sending us across town to save three or four important pesos, the approximate equivalent of a dime.

They never once-on any level-asked for anything.

“Friends!” They’d say when I questioned why they were being so nice. “Brothers! Why, you almost Tao Gama now!”

Of course, we felt obliged to give as well as take. We’d often bring back candy for the kids, bakery goods for the old folks, and strong intoxicants for the fisherman. (A bottle of strong rum costs the equivalent of 38 cents!)
Soon I was helping them fabricate their dive gear-my, how they loved modern epoxy! We had a couple of spare masks aboard Wild Card which I donated, and they immediately punched out the plastic lens and traded a fish for a custom-cut glass one. My plastic shoes were getting old, and I carry spares, so I gave my used pair to the group as well. Rico ended up with them. He was extremely proud to now be the only one with store-bought shoes. How he was selected for such a high honor we could never discover.

To pay us back, they brought us to see Mama Mary, a local Catholic shrine, as well as the stunning Monte Cueva, a large Catholic church in a huge, water-dripping mountain cave.

In the end, I wanted to do something extra special for them. What they wanted most was to go as a group to the Sunday cockfights. So be it.

Frankly, I thought I’d be more grossed out. I have no love of blood sports. I’m an admitted wimp; I go on deck when Carolyn loudly chops up a chicken for dinner. But the boys of the Tao Gama enjoyed the cockfight immensely, and I didn’t see anything happen that Frank Perdue hasn’t done a million times.

Toward the end of our visit, I gave them an autographed copy of a book I’d written. They immediately sealed it inside of several plastic bags and nailed it proudly to the side of their dining area. They never opened it, but I’ve noticed that people who can’t read often respect books more than those who can.

At the conclusion of our daylong farewell party, I stood up and delivered a speech about international hospitality and universal good manners. I told them the plain, simple, unvarnished truth: that we’d been to virtually every prestigious yacht club in the world-from Sardina to London to New York to New Zealand-and nowhere was I more warmly, more graciously welcomed than right here in Maasin, on Leyte, in the Philippines.

I thought they might think I was exaggerating a tad, but they didn’t.

Sumaya, their leader, stood up slowly. As the wild cheers of good-bye went up he said, “Well, Fatty, I’m sure those other places are all well and good but, hey, they ain’t Tao Gama, are they?”

The Pacific behind them for now, Cap’n Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander are exploring the Mediterranean aboard Wild Card

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The post The Heaven and Hell of the Philippines appeared first on Cruising World.

Langkawi 368

The beauty of sailing around the world is that you can do it at your own pace. There are no rules. Aboard Wild Card, Carolyn and I have no schedule or preconceived plan, only a commitment to love each other and the planet. Our watery lives are whimsical, in the best sense of the word. For example, we attended the party for my mother’s 90th birthday last year, and the consequence of this Stateside sojourn was that the monsoonal weather patterns ended up causing us to stay an extra year in Southeast Asia, sailing out of the tiny island of Langkawi, off Malaysia’s western shore.

Why not? What’s an extra year or two when you’re having fun?

We’ve found a vague pattern that suits us: We sail hard for a couple of years, averaging 8,000 miles or so per, then hole up someplace wonderful to recharge our batteries, rehab the boat, and build back up the cruising kitty.
We weren’t expecting the island of Langkawi (the name in Malay means “fish hawk”) to be such an ideal spot for this, but that’s how it turned out. As Carolyn often says, “The best parts of cruising are always a surprise.”
The local Malays of Langkawi are extremely friendly. There’s little or no crime. Weather conditions are benign (read: no hurricanes) all year long. Anchoring is free, and your vessel can stay without regulation for as long as you want. Visitors can stay for as long as they want, too, provided that they don’t work and that they leave the country for 72 hours every three months, an easy task because exotic Thailand and bustling Singapore lie, respectively, to the north and the south. (Getting a visa eliminates the need to make a visa run to a neighboring country.)

Perhaps the nicest aspect is that ethnically diverse Langkawi (40 percent Malay, 40 percent Chinese, 10 percent Indian, 10 percent other), and Malaysia itself, offers the best of both worlds: the laid-back ease of the Third World with the telecommunications and creature comforts of the industrialized West.

The air-conditioned library is right across the street from the dinghy dock, and the very-observant librarian knows all the books that I’ve already read-and, in his opinion, should read.

We didn’t even need an alarm clock since the crescent-shaped harbor rings each morning with the calls to prayer coming from the minarets of the five nearby mosques.

Sailing conditions are generally light, with flat seas. Dozens of pristine harbors are within an easy daysail; most of them deserted both ashore and afloat. Phuket, Thailand, is less than 24 hours away under sail. Empty beaches abound. Miniature pink dolphins and playful sea otters frolic. Monkeys are everywhere. Mind you, watch your soap-the imps eat the bars and drink the liquid!

Langkawi is an extremely inexpensive place to live. Food is cheap; the most expensive entrée on the menu at our favorite restaurant can be had for the equivalent of US$1.20. To use the full services of downtown Kuah’s Pelancongan Jetty-the dinghy dock, security, toilet, showers, and the like-costs 50 cents a day.

Long-term, supervised, in-the-water storage can be had up the river at a place cruisers call Hole-in-the-Wall for just over a buck a day; that includes fore-and-aft mooring and daily monitoring by an experienced local boatman.

There are three marinas on the island. Our favorite is at Rebak, where US$10 a day not only buys you a state-of-the-art modern marina slip but all the conveniences of a luxury resort as well. Carolyn loves the free cooking classes on Thursdays; I dig the gym.

There are three chandleries on the island, with weekly deliveries from West Marine and numerous other international marine suppliers. Best of all, there’s absolutely no duty on anything for your vessel. We just mark it “Yacht Wild Card, in transit” and it sails unmolested through customs. Thus we paid not a penny in duty on our new mainsail, engine parts, and recent electro-doodads.

While the boat boys in the harbor aren’t the bargain they are in Thailand, US$12 a day per will buy you a swarm of refinishers at the snap of a finger.

Two shipyards provide haulout facilities for everything from dinghies to mega-yachts. There are canvas makers, woodworkers, and even a modest sail-repair loft. (Longhaired Erika is Finnish and, perhaps, the loveliest sailmaker in the entire world. OK, it’s true: I’m smitten.)

As low as prices are, we wouldn’t have stayed merely because of the delightful economics. It was the friendly, welcoming people who enthralled us.

It’s no surprise that with all these advantages, Langkawi is popular as a cruising destination. Many Aussies use it as their northernmost home base. Many elderly world cruisers swallow the hook here not by moving ashore but by living aboard with no plans to leave. Example: Charlie Thomas, the 78-years-young former CEO of Jensen Marine, just carried his lovely bride over the companionway of the 65-foot Bravado.

This is also the easternmost staging area for the Chagos crowd, the crews of a dozen or so hearty vessels that spend half the year in Langkawi and the other half in those lovely and peopleless atolls in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

I write this from our breezy cockpit, within easy sight of Tigger, Aku Ankka, Brumby, Tramontana, Mariposa, and the other boats that will be, once again, heading for Chagos within the month.

Kiwi Phil is always building or rebuilding boats here, when he’s not doing the same in the Caribbean. Paul the Brit is a notorious wood butcher, too. Canadian Glen helped a lot of the tsunami-battered boaters to get back on their keels and return to the water. Aussie Noel watches over dozens of boats by day and charters out of a major resort at night for lovely light-air moonlight sails. Nobody is getting rich, but everyone is having fun and replenishing the cruising kitty.

My current best friend in the harbor is Nashville songwriter Gene Nelson, who sails a C&C 48, Emelia. Gene and his brother wrote Kathy Mattea’s “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” and several other country hits.
We sing and play our dueling guitars together almost nightly at Amanda’s, a local waterfront coffee shop. The crowds might not be as large as he’s used to in Vegas, but the vibe is good, and there’s no dollar signs in anyone’s eyes.

Amanda, a local Malay who attended college in the States, is the unofficial harbor den mother. If you need to borrow a car, have an old battery recycled, or require a translator, she’s generous to a fault. Her eyes always light up when a group of us sea gypsies sail into her shop and chorus, “Where’s Amanda, the Coffee Queen of Kuah?”

Her coffee shop is every bit as warm and wonderful as she is. It has both free WiFi and an in-house snake charmer; only in Malaysia would such a combo be totally unremarkable.

So we’ve just spent two delightful, adventure-filled years in Southeast Asia while sailing out of Malaysia. Wild Card gleams, fresh from the shipyard. Our bank accounts are bulging, and we have more friends ashore and afloat than we ever dreamed was possible. We’re tentatively headed for the Med via the Red Sea, Somali pirates permitting. As we hoist our barnacle-encrusted anchors, we know only one thing for sure: Someday we’ll return to lovely, lazy Langkawi.

To catch up with the Sea Gypsies, don’t miss the latest installment of Cap’n Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander’s video series, “Dealing the Wild Card,” at CW’s website (www.cruisingworld.com

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Honeymooners 368

Knowing the precise moment at which an important life-changing event takes place is sometimes difficult, especially on a sailboat: Daily shipboard routine has no bookmark, no laugh track, no freeze frame to commemorate the exact time of our triumphs or tragedies. But it might’ve happened for me with Christian on the morning of the third day of our Thailand cruise. Our 38-foot S&S-designed Hughes sloop, Wild Card, was already under way when I realized that a knot had worked its way into our dinghy painter.

“Christian,” I said to my freshly-minted son-in-law, “I’m gonna take the strain while you untie it, OK?”
“Sure,” he said.

It wasn’t a complicated job. There were no mistakes. He wasn’t particularly heroic. I certainly imparted no great wisdom. Just two very different men, brought together by one very special woman, doing a simple, mechanical task for the mutual benefit of their watery tribe.

It’s the small, unremarkable events that make up the velvet chains of family, isn’t it?

I’ve never seen my wife, Carolyn, happier. Our daughter, Roma Orion, a third-generation liveaboard when she left for Brandeis University in 2000, was back aboard. We were a complete family again. Even better, we had an eager new crewmember: Christian Rojas, our daughter’s Colombian-born, German-nurtured, British-raised, Spanish-kissed, Austrian-scented, newly naturalized-American husband. (“It’s like marrying the United Nations,” Roma says.)

Most parents aren’t asked by their newlywed daughter and her grinning groom if they can honeymoon with them-but we Goodlanders aren’t “most parents,” are we?

When Roma first suggested chilling out from their nuptials by cruising with us for a couple of weeks, it wasn’t easy to decide just what country and sailing venue would be best. We were in the lonely, windswept Federated States of Micronesia at the time.

We thought that the distances between these tiny Pacific islands and their potential for heavy weather were both too great. They were utterly mesmerizing, true, but not user-friendly. The Philippines were our next stop, but the poverty and corruption ashore could put a damper on things afloat. Obviously, we wanted this get-acquainted cruise to be perfect-as perfect, at least, as two goofy, nutty, wind-blown, tie-dyed, salt-stained parents such as ourselves could manage.

So the Philippines and Micronesia were out.

Forget the hyperspeed of commerce-clogged Hong Kong. Indonesia is a wonderfully diverse and exciting destination, but it’s too politically volatile and potentially violent. Nix on Vietnam because of its systemic corruption and lack of due process. Ditto Cambodia. As for Myanmar, a.k.a. Burma-well, not until the courageous, Nobel Peace Prize-winning, under-house-arrest-so-long-her-house-is-falling-down Aung San Suu Kyi walks free among her liberated people!

This left Malaysia as a strong possibility. We love the Malays, a kind, gentle people. We always feel perfectly safe and very welcome there. The country has a million good harbors, and air transportation is excellent-but the problem with Malaysia is that it’s so civilized and economically advanced a global destination that you don’t feel you’re really somewhere exotic.

Also, Islam is the official religion of Malaysia, and public displays of physical affection (called khalwat, an Arabic word meaning “close proximity”), including sitting too close-are strictly against the law. Even Carolyn and I, after 38 years of wedded bliss, have to be careful when sitting on a romantic, flower-canopied park bench at the Lumut Yacht Club not to forget ourselves. And I’m afraid our two newlyweds were exactly that and couldn’t go more than 10 seconds or so without severely offending Sharia law.

This left tiny Brunei. We’d enjoyed our recent stay there immensely. The sultan is quite a dude, with his 64 Rolls-Royces, his flying force of 747s, his palace of 1,773 rooms, and his dining table that seats 4,000 on formal occasions. Not to mention his fleet of megayachts scattered through the world.

But there’s something eerie and spooky about Brunei. Downtown has everything a modern city should have: shopping malls, highways, street lights, even parking-meter maids. It only lacks a single ingredient: people. Oil money can mimic the free marketplace by purchasing its exact, picture-perfect façade, but it can never quite duplicate it.

Brunei seemed to us like the movie set of the 1960’s TV show The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan-a bit too weird and surreal to be true.

So Carolyn and I decided, after careful consideration, to host the newlywed charter in the most dramatic, most unusual, most visually exciting, most breathtaking place to sail on this planet-Phangnga Bay, in Thailand.

It’s difficult to describe the otherworldly beauty of Phangnga Bay, the northern end of the body of water that lies between the resort island of Phuket and mainland Thailand. It’s as if you’ve sailed to another planet or another geological dimension. The water there is shallow. Because the bay is landlocked, there’s no swell or sea, just perfectly flat, calm water. There are hundreds of deserted islands, each one boasting a perfect anchorage on one side, depending on whether the nor’east or sou’west monsoon is blowing.

Except for the well-traveled trench between Ko Phing Kan-known locally as James Bond Island since The Man with the Golden Gun-and Phuket, the bay is completely devoid of cruising yachts. We occasionally spotted a sail on the horizon, but we never shared an anchorage with another yacht.

But it isn’t the sailing or the water that’s so unique in Phangnga; it’s the islands-the improbable rocks themselves.

I’m not a geologist, but here’s a Fatty-ized version of what happened long ago: Volcanic eruptions happened many times beneath a shallow bay of water, repeatedly shooting lava and molten rocks through the water and into the air. It rained large rocks and small islands in Phangnga Bay. Different types of rocks and minerals got mixed together and were spray-gunned everywhere. Eventually, things settled down. Millions of years passed. The softer rocks wore away first, leaving giant caves and open spaces at sea level. Then another eruption nearby bumped all the islands up about 25 feet. The sandstone bases of the thinner islands then eroded even more, leaving needlelike rocks jutting toward the sky with bases narrower than the tops-like giant, old-fashioned iron nails tossed into the placid, smoking sea by a crazy, demented god.

Caves are everywhere. Giant, nearly endless caves. Some you can swim into. For others, you need the dinghy. Some can be reached on foot. Bats abound, as do large lizards, iguanas, monkeys, poisonous snakes, gibbons, too.

There are almost no villages. Occasionally, a grinning fisherman in a longtail, a canoe powered by a small engine connected to a very long shaft, will zoom by and hold up his catch in hopes of a sale, but nothing else will disturb your peace. And a couple of bucks will buy you more live shrimp than you can possibly eat.

There are no docks, no marinas, no navigational aids, no nutt’n, which is exactly how we like it. A number of our anchorages were completely devoid of any manmade light at all. However, because Christian’s work-he’s a rising financial executive in an increasingly global company-requires him to be in constant touch with Holland, Germany, Spain, and the United States, we were never-alas-out of mobile-phone range.

The navigation in Phangnga bay is dead simple: Don’t hit the rocks below or above. There’s a lot of ’em, but they aren’t difficult to avoid. The mornings are usually calm. By midafternoon, there’s a freshening breeze with a westerly component. This builds until the early evening, when the seas politely go flat once again-which is all perfect when the focus is on the interior familial journey and not ocean sailing.

Our first passage, from Yacht Haven on Phuket to Ko Phanak, lasted all of three hours. We motorsailed most of it on port tack as the westerly breeze built. We had the hook down well before lunch. While Carolyn and Roma chatted and made fresh bread, Christian and I dashed ashore to go cave exploring.

One cave was large enough that we could drive the dinghy right in and beach it on the sandy spit within. I aimed my flashlight at the menacing, dripping, mineral-hued, many-ton objects hanging from the distant cave roof.
“Stalactites,” I said, “have to hold tight, while their lower counterparts,”-I shone my light at the almost identical yet inverted columns on the cave floor-“stalagmites, don’t.”

Occasionally, a bat would flick by, and we’d both duck like it was an Indiana Jones movie. We almost stepped on two giant, noisy-when-awakened lizards-which looked like prehistoric dinosaurs in the now-quivering white beams of our flashlights.

The farther we went, the more we lost the light from the cave entrance. Finally, we were wading through murky gloom. “I should’ve brought a ball of string to trail,” I mused uneasily under my breath. Finally we came to a fork in the tunnel. Somebody had been there before us-there was writing on the wall in Thai. “I wonder what it says,” Christian whispered. I pretended to read it. “On the left side it says ‘Certain death,’ and on the right side ‘Probably death,'” I reported.

“Let’s go with the latter,” he said, as he confidently took the lead. I gingerly followed, thinking, “He’s beating me at my own game!”

Carolyn is convinced it happened at our second, more northward anchorage of that first day, which was also in the lee of Ko Phanak. We’d spent a wonderful afternoon climbing cliffs, exploring caves, and swimming. Now it was evening and pitch-black outside. There were a million stars, many so close we had to be careful not to breathe on them. It was quiet. There were only natural sounds, such as the water gently lapping at our hull.

“Today, I saw a promiscuous monkey ashore,” I said, trying to sound as nonchalant as I possibly could.

Carolyn, despite knowing she was being drawn in, couldn’t resist. “I think you mean proboscis monkey,” she said.

“I know an X-rated scene when I see one,” I huffed. “But hey, I’m willing to be corrected. Let me amend that to ‘I saw a couple of promiscuous proboscis monkeys monkeying around today!'”

Christian laughed. Another point in his favor.

Then I tossed the remainder of my tea into the water on the starboard side. The bioluminescence was amazing. We oohed and ahhed. Then I shook the dinghy painter. An explosion of light! Carolyn splatted the boat hook-wow! Roma tossed in sea shells-yahoo!

It enthralled us for a long time, but eventually we tired of it. Christian quietly stole away to the port side to drain his bilge in privacy, but there’s no privacy on a 38-foot boat full of Goodlanders.

“Beautiful!” cried Carolyn, as the perfectly still water was filled with blue dancing diamonds. “Oh, wow!” said Roma. “Nice!” I had to admit.

Later, Carolyn said, “Funny how sailing helps families bond, eh?”

For Roma, the magic moment took place while she, Christian, and Carolyn were watching the anchor come up. “Asses and elbows,” I called. “I want to see only asses and elbows!”

This puzzled Christian until Roma explained that she and her mother had been hauling up anchors together for many years-and this was the first time she’d sailed with our “decadent” Maxwell windlass and could ignore my Captain Bligh rant.

The funniest moment came while Wild Card was anchored between Ko Kudu Noi and Ko Kudu Ya. My black swimming trunks and the black swimming trunks I’d lent Roma both had tired elastic. I was scraping barnacles. Christian had been talking to Roma, then swam off. We’d both been diving to remove the lower barnacles on the keel, and somehow we’d changed sides. I saw Christian swim back, looking down. He was behind me. Then I felt my drooping swim trucks hitched up and a little squeeze.

Now, I’m a liberal guy. I believe in live and let live. But even I have limits. And being patted on my-.
I abruptly turned and glared at my startled son-in-law.

“Oh, my god!” he blurted out, wide-eyed and red-faced. “I thought it was Roma! Sorry, Mister Goodlander!”
From then on, just before entering a restaurant or a dark tunnel or getting into the dinghy, I’d say loudly, as Carolyn and Roma giggled, “Just don’t grab my butt, Christian!”

Of course, I’d sternly promised myself not to judge my new son-in-law but to merely enjoy him. But what man is so perfect he can put away the yardstick on his daughter’s spouse?

Carolyn would come into the cockpit, and he’d move to allow her more room. Somebody’s coffee cup would be empty, and he’d dash below to fetch a refill. If Roma needed a cushion, he’d offer the one on which he was sitting. He didn’t ask if the dishes needed doing, he just did them. He wasn’t just polite. He was nice.
I taught him how to coil a line. My cockpit was never neater.

Our ancient two-horse outboard is finicky. He mastered the complicated start-up sequence the first time.
He never resented anything I told him, and I never had to tell him anything twice.

I was amazed to discover that I didn’t just like him-I admired him. By dint of hard labor and perseverance, he’d risen to the boardrooms of America by working two jobs, studying English at night, and earning an M.B.A.
He is, without doubt, the embodiment of the American Dream.

And he kept his sense of humor when I’d prod him with such questions as “Why waste your life ashore?” and “Is it true that you have an income addiction?” and “Didn’t grad school seem a bit, well, educationally excessive?”

I really don’t know when Christian became family, only that he did. And that it happened before we scrubbed Wild Card’s bottom together. How do I know? Because, later that evening, after they’d all had a few beers and I’d caught a contact high, I was telling them around the galley table after a feast that “it was the fastest, most aggressive barnacle I’ve ever seen, and I only turned my back on the evil crustacean for a mere nanosecond. It slid over and took my whole foot into its mouth! I tried to pull my foot out and swim for the surface-but no luck! Just as I was about to lose consciousness, when I could see the White Light and King Neptune slowly approaching, Christian dove down with a huge machete and started savagely hacking away at the screaming beast.”

They were all laughing when Christian blurted out, “Your dad is so full of it, Roma!”

Which made us laugh harder. He finally had my number! And I had his.

The Goodlanders continue to ping-pong between Malaysia and Thailand.

Thailand: harbors, sailing, charters

Language and the Wrong DVDs to Bring
Once outside of the cities, few Thais speak English. Yet communication is easy in the Land of Smiles-all you have to do is keep grinning. The gender of a speaker, however, is important. For instance, to say hello, Carolyn would say, “Sawat-dii kha,” but I would say, “Sawat-dii khrap.” To indicate thanks, s female says, “Khawp khun kha”; a man says, “Khawp khun khrap.” Mai pen rai, however, is casual and doesn’t change with the gender of the speaker-and it means “No problem!,” which is nearly always true in Thailand.

The Thais are the most polite people on Earth. During a recent demonstration in Bangkok, Carolyn and I were amused to see protesters, forcibly breaking through the gates of parliament to seize control of the building, stop to offer to their enemies a wai, the slight bow of Thai salutation in which both hands are pressed together respectfully.

There’s only one way to get yourself in trouble in Thailand: criticize the king. This is an absolute no-no. He is revered as a living god. Just be careful: Transporting a DVD of the movie The King and I, starring Yul Brenner, will get your boat confiscated instantly.

Good Harbors and Bad
Ao Chalong, the main harbor in Phuket, is well protected in all weather. But it’s busy with commercial traffic, and the anchorage is both crowded and dangerous, especially since large Thai vessels often begin dragging their rock anchors if the wind gusts over six or eight knots.

We used to anchor here-until the bars and brothels started to outnumber the religious shrines and wats, Buddhist compounds in which men and women can be ordained, respectively, as monks and nuns. Now we hang out at the northern end of the island, anchored in the channel at Laem Phrao. This is near the Yacht Haven marina, which allows us complete use of its facilities-dinghy dock, security, pool, gym, cable TV, and anchorage-wide WiFi-for the magnificent sum of US$15 a month. That’s not a misprint. Numerous tiny Muslim restaurants ashore offer a basic dinner for US$1.50 and a feast for US$4.

Marinas also exist at the Phuket Boat Lagoon and Ao Po Grand Marina, but anchoring is discouraged there.

Weather
Generally, winds off Thailand are light. In the summer, which runs from June to October, the sou’west monsoon blows, and in winter, from November to February, the nor’east monsoon kicks in. Depending on the season, you can get anywhere in the northern Indian Ocean-to or from Thailand, via the Andaman Sea-by sailing downwind! Most sailing craft on circumnavigations get to Thailand (via Bali, in Indonesia) in November and leave for Sri Lanka in January. Hurricanes are almost nonexistent, although this might be changing. August and September are in the rainy season.

Chartering in Thailand
Sunsail Sailing Vacations (www.sunsail.com) is active in Southeast Asia. Besides bases on Koh Chang and Koh Samui, in the Gulf of Thailand, and on the mainland at Phuket, fronting on the Andaman Sea, the company has a base on the Malaysian island of Langkawi (it’s 130 miles from Phuket) and can offer longer, one-way charters.
Other charter companies with boats in the region include Dream Yacht Charter (www.dreamyachtcharter.com), Elite Yachting (www.elite-sail-dive.com), Latitude 8 (www.latitude8yachts.com), Charter Yacht Sailing (www.charter-yacht.com), and Siam Sailing (www.sailing-charter-thailand.com).

F.G., with Elaine Lembo

The post The Honeymooners of PhangNga Bay appeared first on Cruising World.

PN Dagon 368

If you were to free associate from the word “Borneo,” you might come up with The Wild Man of Borneo, which is the title of a 1941 MGM movie. Kota Kinabalu, a large, modern city of endless shopping malls located on the northwest coast of the Malaysian state of Sabah, probably wouldn’t come to mind.

So how do world cruisers arriving at KK, as it’s known, hear about the small marina at the five-star, very civilized, Sutera Harbour Resort?

The same way that we usually do: by word of mouth. And KK’s reputation definitely precedes it.
Living at Sutera Harbour is like having a staff of hundreds for the price of a reasonable marina berth. Of the two-dozen nonlocal boats, only one or two qualify as resident liveaboard vessels. Everyone else at this crossroads is movin’ on.

First to leave after we arrived one January were Jan and Bill Wiggins. When we pulled into the slip next door on Oddly Enough, our Peterson 44, they were busily stocking up on cases of mineral water and had the distracted air of cruisers thinking about their next port. Though hailing originally from Ohio, they’d sailed Jipz Rose, their Baba 35, down from Okinawa, a southern island in the Japanese archipelago. Bill was based there as a U.S. Marine Corps pilot. He flew generals around Southeastern Asia in Learjets, and he often had stopovers in KK. The military put him up in the Pacific Hotel, which overlooks the marina.

“I’m going to get a boat and bring it in here someday,” he used to tell his buddies, much to their amusement.
Boats hadn’t been in their past, but they bought the Baba in Tokyo from a man who was paying a small fortune to keep it in a marina.

Five years ago, they started working their way south through the Philippines. From Sutera, they planned to resume their cruise south, stopping along the Borneo coast. Then it’s across the South China Sea to Singapore. Once there, they’ll put Jipz Rose up for another season and visit their houses and families in Ohio and Hawai’i.
Though Bill is retired after 25 years in the Marines, Jan still produces a newsletter about church activities for new military personnel on Okinawa. She enjoys her work, and she’s less sanguine about sailing than Bill.

“When we’re home we say, ‘Let’s sell the boat.’ But when we return, and I’ve been on the boat awhile, I say, ‘Let’s keep on sailing,'” reports Jan. It’s a dilemma many out here have.

Tom Sager and Fran Ashton were next to leave on Dagon. We’d last seen the beautiful toreador-red, 1972-vintage Nicholson 55 yawl in 2003 leaving Îles Wallis, in the Pacific, for its voyage home to New Zealand. Both hold dual citizenship: He’s an American with a New Zealand passport; she’s a Kiwi with a U.S. passport. They met in New Zealand, where they owned a Tayana 37.

Dagon had been moldering on a mooring in Auckland for eight years when they first saw her. They hadn’t been seriously thinking of moving up, Fran says, but “she looked so lovely sitting on the water that we got sucked in.”
“‘He,'” says Tom. “British boats are male.” Hmm. Dagon was the god the Hebrews were worshipping when Samson tore down the temple; hence, their dinghies are named Samson and Delilah.

The boat really is lovely-and quirky in a British way. Her original owners raced her in the 1973 Admiral’s Cup and the Fastnet Race, then cruised her for several years. She has rod-and-linkage steering and still using the original Neco autopilot from 1972, which Tom keeps going by cannibalizing two complete units. She’s made of wood from the deck up, and Tom and Fran spent a year in a shed in Australia taking the deck off and rebuilding it. “We repainted the boat in a more sedate burgundy, but the paint didn’t hold, and after it was resanded, we found out there was no more burgundy paint available,” Tom recalls. “So we repainted her toreador red.”

Tom and Fran arrived in KK a couple of years ago, having heard of the marina from cruisers in Micronesia. Now, hoping to time their cruise to avoid the worst of the typhoon season, they headed Dagon for the Philippines, then Japan.

Adding Taiwan to the itinerary, they can day-hop almost the entire way, an amazing concept to me. Most of the marina was out to see them off.

Our turn came next. By now, we’d been at Sutera for a month while we worked on small projects and enjoyed the resort’s five pools, free movies, and WiFi in air-conditioned comfort in the marina clubhouse. In between, we’d gotten involved in some extracurricular cat trapping. Nynke Fortuin from Wal Rus had borrowed a trap from the marina office and was using it to prove that wild cats-and not the four felix domesticus residents on the dock-were using boats as litter boxes.

We’d set the trap on our finger pier for several nights, but we’d only managed to catch a boat cat that had been left out. Nynke baited the trap with dried shrimp, then made sure that her own ship’s cat, Phukat, and the other boat cats were locked in for the night.

On most nights here, we’d hear a wild cat’s challenging howl. On our final morning at Sutera, we saw that one pesky feline had managed to snag the food dish and eat all of the shrimp-without setting off the trap. Some devilishly smart cats live in these parts!

Nynke and her husband, Jim Klick, were waiting on a delivery of boat parts before leaving the marina themselves.
“Luxury problems,” she calls them. “When I think of the suffering people in Darfur, I have difficulty with my own feeling of impatience.”

Nynke solves her urge to “save the world” by addressing one small issue at a time, such as trapping wild cats and finding them homes or helping poor fishermen get by.

Having sailed on Wal Rus since the mid-1990s and on a previous boat since 1980, Jim and Nynke are one of the longest-cruising couples I know.

Their first boat was the same length as Wal Rus, 49 feet, but it was a seven-ton racer. They bought her in Perth, on Australia’s west coast, and took their first long passages heading east along the continent’s forbidding southern coast.

“That boat was like being on an eternal camping trip,” says Jim, who grew up sailing small boats in San Francisco Bay.

Wal Rus, a sturdy steel bilge-keel ketch built in New Zealand, carries the name of three boats that Nynke’s father owned during her years growing up in Holland. Jim and Nynke have continued crossing the world’s oceans in her, trying always to go east.

The couple seem at peace with their long cruising life and with each other. Every July, they give themselves time to reassess their feelings about it all.

When Jim and Nynke leave Sutera, they’ll head for Cambodia, at the head of the Gulf of Thailand. Recently opened up to cruisers, it’s only about 900 miles from KK.

That makes two boats going north to one going south-well, two south, since we’re heading to Brunei. It’s less than 100 miles away.

Our Malaysian visas are up, and we need to head out on a “visa run.” Might as well see a new country. But in a month, we’ll go north again.

Choices, choices.

Ann Hoffner and Thomas T. Bailey are using Sutera Harbour as a base for cruising in Malaysian Borneo and for catching up on boat projects aboard Oddly Enough, their Peterson 44.

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