Sailing Salsa Website update, Bali to Phuket
Well overdue and without any charts or notes to aid myself I’ll do my best to re-cap my version of the trip from Bali to Phuket on Happy Ours with Captain Phil. As I mentioned in earlier blogs the temptation to visit Thailand was too much plus I was enjoying Bali enough to spend some extra time there so that I added yet another year to the Circumnavigation, Originally three years, now is looking more like five. However I was warned off of crossing the equator twice and dealing with freighters in the Malacca Straights so I opted to leave poor little Salsa Moored in Sarangan, Bali, Indonesia for a few months while I take the side trip to Thailand. The previous website entry is Phil’s log from the trip and I felt like I really should make some kind of entry myself so here it goes (as I recall it).
The days leading up to the departure from Bali were quite hectic for me. It seems that leaving your boat to go on a journey is actually more work than preparing your boat for a journey! For the first time ever I stripped off every sail and stowed them below, well actually I took everything off deck and put it below, removed most of the foods on board and then spent a good day rat-proofing the boat. Even though I’m on a mooring this anchorage is known to have rats boarding boats and doing serious damage. I put funnels on the mooring lines to make it harder for them to climb up the ropes and then put poisons and traps inside the boat, not much left to do but hope for the best. I have a local Indonesian guy looking after her, his only responsibility is to check the bilge, mooring lines, and battery voltage once a week but I’m told that I’ll be lucky if ever takes a single look on the boat while I’m gone. Oh well, too late now and at least Salsa is moored within a few hundred meters of his house which is on the water so at the very least he can see her daily if he just looks in the right direction. I also got a few emails from friends on other boats that were passing through Bali and told me Salsa was looking good so that’s been relieving but I’m still nervous about her there.
Back to the passage, so after last minute provisioning Phil did most of the prep on “Happy Ours” His boat, a 40’ Oday and we were off within a day or two of our original targeted departure date. Things were going really well for the first 48 hours or so, but that’s not saying much when you take a 30 day voyage. I think we left around Sept 1st, expecting a 3 week passage as we were warned about squalls and calms along the way and of course we did have to cross the equator / ITCZs or the “Doldrums” as they are known. After two days of steady wind, things got light. We did a bit of sailing at 3ish knots but at least then we were still moving. Within a few days of leaving the nights turned into squalls and rain usually mixed with dead wind so we often just hove to or drifted a good part of the night as we still had intentions of making it Thailand almost entirely under sail. I would guess that around a week out of Bali we got restless and were out of beer and meat and feeling no pressure to make Thailand fast so we stopped at an anchorage on the South side of Java (we went outside / west of Java and Sumatra avoiding the Mallaca Straights but adding about 400 miles to the 1700 mile passage, give or take). I won’t go into all the oddities of this anchorage that wasn’t really an anchorage but I can tell you it was a popular tourist destination for Indonesians (not foreigners) and we survived the worst beach-surf landing I‘ve ever seen with the dinghy swamped by multiple big breaking waves.. We did manage to find some cold beer and food but not the type of provisioning we are accustomed to, I’ve seen smaller remote villages with much better provisioning, and we didn’t feel we were in real need of water and fuel so off we went after our first night.
We tried to pick up the pace a bit after this first stop as Phil finally got an email from his brother letting us know the dates he would be arriving in Thailand to visit,. Unfortunately his schedule meant that we would either have to motor quite a bit or get lucky with the weather to arrive in time to meet him. Well we didn’t get any luckier with the weather, after that things got plain crappy. We had to motor most of the nights and do our best sailing through the squalls. Most days we had a light head wind that we could actually sail into at 3 to 4 knots but night time sailing was more miss than hit, we used a lot of fuel. Not to mention that we didn’t have a working autopilot so these rainy gloomy nights motoring were mostly done hand steering, something that I consider on par with torture most of the time. At least when we were sailing we could let the wind vane steer, this was a serious motivation to sail when we could but no wind is no wind. Not to mention that when we did get wind we were afraid to put up enough canvas as we were often nailed by strong winds with little warning (no warning at night as we couldn’t see the clouds). By the time we got to Thailand we had made two more stops, both in Sumatra where we scavenged for fuel and water with varying degrees of success but of course getting at least the minimum supplies we needed to make Thailand. The stops along the way were actually quite interesting, sailing into poorly or uncharted anchorages that are not in any of the guide books. You meet people that don’t see a lot of “yachties” and that always makes for a more interesting visit if you can cope with the lack of facilities.
Our only big break in the weather was as we neared the northern tip of Sumatra where we would turn east and head straight for Phuket. By now we had the main sail blown out, completely torn and unusable, maybe repairable but we at least had a smallish spare, with the jib not looking so healthy either. So let’s just say we needed a break. Both the wind and the current were in our favor and were seeing speeds in the 7kt neighborhood all day, maybe longer I can’t remember. But I do remember that as soon as we were North of Sumatra turning east the wind stopped and now we were in a major shipping area with freighters that really don’t answer the radio or yield any right-of-way. You really had to watch out for yourself and frequently dodge massive freighters that were nearly running you down. Without Radar or AIS this became a bit hectic. I even remember at least one once having to wake up Phil because I couldn’t tell what a ship was doing and believe I’ve seen my fair share!
The approach to Phuket was still a bit stressful as we did not know if we could make it in before dark or if we could safely negotiate the anchorage after dark, we did NOT want to spend one more bloody day at sea so we ran the motor and motor-sailed as fast as we could making our arrival just at dusk. Yay. Tired, probably exhausted, we ran into Michael from Shayler who didn’t have any beer on board but showed us to the dinghy dock and nearest bar where were soon in much better spirits. While Phil and I got along well and generally had a good time watching movies, having the occasional beer and eating fairly well, this was still one of the worst passages I’ve been on, probably THE worst. We expected crappy weather but I’ve never seen calms for SO long mixed with generally unassailable squalls. Mix this with no auto-pilot and limited fuel I think the trip took almost exactly a month, and we were working hard to get there for the last three weeks. Between the two of us we did get a reasonable amount of sleep and luckily until we rounded North of Sumatra there was little traffic but this is not a passage for a sailing purist. It might have been tolerable in smaller doses broken up with more and longer stops along the coast but we simply didn’t have the time with Phil’s brother arriving and the changing Monsoon threatening to produce constant headwinds.
Since arriving in Thailand we mostly hung out in Ao Chalong Bay, Phuket. Not because we like it so much but it’s easy and its one of a few all weather anchorages. We also took a trip to Krabi and Phi Phi for a few days just to get away, and that was quite fun, Phi Phi Le is beautiful and only a day sail from Phuket.
And more recently I jumped off of the boat to take an inland trip by buses, trains and motorbike from Phuket to Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Pai, and Mae Hong Son., and back. Right now I’m in my hotel in Bangkok but I’ll be back in Phuket in a few days and will try to update with a blog of my big inland adventure, especially about the 3 day 800km motorbike trip I made through the mountains of Northern Thailand and to the highest point in the country , Doi Inthannon. I attached a few photos but all my pictures have all ready been posted to the website or at this link;
Hope this email finds everyone well, I’m really enjoying my time here in Thailand, no regrets at all in spite of the nasty passage here!