We had been in Singapore for over a month and after many delays and dollars, we finally left Raffles Marina on Friday, 11 June 2010. What? Leaving on a Friday? Is it not bad luck to leave port on a Friday? Well, we cheated. We didn’t actually leave port. We motored over to St. John’s Island and anchored there for the night.
We left early on Saturday, 12 June 2010. The sails went up but the wind was not cooperative and we had to motor-sail all the way, save for about 6 hours of sailing. The trip was pretty not bad. We had a storm on day 2 just before sunrise with lightning! (OOOPS!); we dropped sails, turned off all our electronics and motored blind but it was not that bad, mostly just rain. It was frustrating though as the waves were setting us back and we were not making much way.
For the largest part of the trip, it was clear skies and millions of stars. There was a beautiful new moon setting one night, where we could almost see the whole moon, though just a sliver was showing. A very bright planet sat right above it. We tried to capture it on camera but to no avail.
We had dolphins come along side to play a couple of times.
We didn’t encounter as many fishing boats as we had over in the west of Malaysia and Thailand. However, there were a couple of close encounters with ships. We had one literally up our stern and we had to raise him on the radio to ask the ship’s intention. He then said he was overtaking us on our starboard but we kept seeing his starboard light, so we hailed him again. Oops, he said, we actually wanted to overtake to port. Duh. We sweated for a while but all was fine.
We arrived at the mouth of the Santubong River at about 1500 hours of Tuesday, 15 June 2010. After a little dicey maneuver, we finally dropped anchor in front of Datuk Linggi’s private dock. Soon after, someone came over in a fishing boat to say hello. Hey he looks very familiar and turned out to be Dollah, one of the crew from Datuk Linggi’s boat, the Melreni. They were berthed next to us at Raffles Marina for many months back in 2002. Datuk Linggi had sold his boat but most of the guys are still working for him. So far we have met Effendi and Zamrin as well as Dollah. It is nice that they still recognize Sari Timur and her crew after all these years. Hmmm, it is so nice to meet old friends.
It is really peaceful here. Mount Santubong looms overhead, with its peak in the clouds sometimes. The birds with their songs, the most beautiful sunset we have ever seen, what more can we ask for. Even the rain didn’t dampen the good feeling.
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