Monthly Archives: February 2019

The closer we came back to Rebak Island the closer we got to a date with the hardstand and days of bunny suits, sanding, eating the dust of our three year old bottom paint mixed with the hard shell remains of several thousand barnacles who chose to hitchhike with us on EV rather than drift aimlessly about the ocean. On the flight back we flew at a very low altitude directly over Escape Velocity gently tugging at her lines. We looked at each other and mumbled “she swims” which I imagine every relived boat owner says after being away from his vessel.

I’d like to say that we hit the ground running but I can’t. 

First we have the Grand Quest. 

I don’t know how I could have left the US with just one set of power tools. No one mentioned this to me. Magazines, conversation, or books…no one. Heartsick at having to strip painfully down to an inadequate collection of 120v tools, I find that the rest of the world does just fine with 240v power tools. So what I’m hearing is that I need two sets of power tools. Now, for normal occasional use I simply use our 120v inverter and Bob’s your uncle. But sanding all day every day is not going to happen on a solar-powered boat. On the hard in 240v land we can’t plug in to the yard’s juice and we can’t run our generator when we’re out of the water, so it’s up to the sun. I had the yard run a 240v line for a sander and a small rented window air conditioner but we still didn’t have a proper 240v random orbiting sander. After searching at every local hardware store we eventually found a heavy duty sander at a Chinese shop in Kuah. 

First up was a complete redesign of EV’s raw water cooling system with dedicated thru- hulls instead of trying to suck cooling water up through the clog-prone sail drives. I added strainers just after the raw water pumps to trap any rubber bits in case of a disintegrating impeller, kind of a suspenders and belt solution.

Every skipper, when passing EV said, “Hey! She looks really good for being out three years!” Maybe so but we’d promised ourselves a slippery bottom this time. I have to agree that she did look pretty good. No blisters, no flaking paint, no glaring problems. Ah, dreams.

Our hot tip on attempting to use stripper to remove the heavy coats of antifouling paint involved multiple layers of plastic wrap in an attempt to keep the goop from drying out. When it failed a fair test, we switched to exhaustive scraping with chisels kept razor sharp by Yours Truly. 

In a few days I threw in the towel. No mas! 

In full bunny suit, goggles, and a better than average mask, I started grinding with our new heavy duty 240v sander. I find the trick here is to go to your happy place and stay there until it’s over. What’s the worst that could happen?

Monkeys, that’s what. Monkeys rifling through the garbage at the end of the dock? No, that’s kind of cute. The rascals send one of the bigger fellas dumpster diving and every so often he’d pop up and hand off something deemed good enough. After a thorough investigation he’d jump out of the can neglecting to close the lid, with something I suspect he’d been holding out on the troop for his own stash, like a couple of rotten bananas I threw out that morning. 

We’ve come upon this same troop walking on Rebak and they can get a little aggressive if they perceive a threat to all the cute wee ones scurrying about the path and in low hanging branches. After all it’s their jungle. 

What I’m talking about is a large long tailed Macaque sitting in our cockpit munching on one of our onions like an apple, staring at us through our glass door while we’re eating dinner. When I looked up, our eyes met and he bared his large yellow fangs. Gulp! A quick inventory of my weapon stash flashed through my mind. No, he has our water hose out there. A carved Marquesan war club?…too short. A Vanuatan hollow stick drum?…it’s just wrong. Food prep knives?…way too short. Flare pistol?…no need to burn the joint down. No, this is a job for Yours Truly who will announce his presence with authority.

Upon opening the door I was met with an unholy howl and a lunge in my general direction. I’m happy to report no blood was spilled, discounting any bruises and contusions due to the retreat and premature closing of the cabin door. Let’s agree to call our first skirmish a draw in place. Now, I won’t pretend to know anything about monkey psychology but I am a keen observer of animal behavior and I’d say our friend here, after finishing his onion, is overwhelmed with ennui or maybe he’s just looking for some action but I was sure I detected a small movement toward the ladder. That’s when I struck. I opened the door a crack and screamed something abusive. It may have involved his mother. That last bit seemed to work and our Humble Skipper courageously leaped out into the cockpit to take possession. The bugger did turn around indignantly when he mounted the ladder as if to burn my face into his memory. Chilling.

Now that I am known as the Monkey King I wonder if I can teach the troop to sand?

It occurs to me that we haven’t described our current “residence.” Since right before Christmas we’ve been living at a marina, a very uncommon situation for the ever-wandering, usually-anchoring Escape Velocity and her crew. But this is Malaysia, a budget friendly country and a beautiful place to hang out for a while to regain financial solvency after 20 months of what we can only characterize as a spending spree in Australia, and to recover from sailing nearly 6000 miles in 9 months, from Sydney almost to the Thailand border. I think last year was the most distance covered in one season since 2015 when we crossed the Pacific from El Salvador to New Zealand. It was exhausting.

Many of the boats we met while traveling north along Australia’s east coast and through Indonesia and Malaysia have scattered to the winds, some sailing onward to Thailand, India, Djibouti or South Africa.

A goodbye dinner for two of our own who are off to caravan through Europe.

A temporary goodbye to the crew of Impetuous Too who will spend seven or eight months in England. We’ll see them again when they return before Christmas.

For some, this is the end of the line and their boats are for sale as they embrace new adventures. Some have parked their boats for longterm maintenance and upgrade projects, or extended trips home to Europe, Australia, or New Zealand. Others are poking around the general vicinity exploring the lifetime of beautiful anchorages along the Malacca Strait, and a few, like us, have ordered the combination platter.

We definitely need to tackle a few maintenance projects and do some upgrades and gear replacement, but we aren’t under any pressure to do it all at once — easier on our fixed income, gentler on our psyches — and we also want to do more land traveling like our wonderful trip to Cambodia. All of that lead to the decision to tie up at a marina for a while. It takes weather worries off our minds, allows us to step on and off the boat to a dock rather than have to dingy ashore every time we want to take a walk or visit a cafe. And it allows us to do some of the things we enjoy that are difficult if we’re constantly moving from anchorage to anchorage. I’ve been cooking a lot more, enjoying craft projects that I can’t do when everything needs to be stowed for travel every few days, catching up on reading and blogging, and just generally having a recognizably domestic life. It’s been fun!

We chose to come to Rebak Island Marina, part of the Vivanta Rebak Island Resort. This is a high end Taj hotel property in a gorgeous, if somewhat isolated, setting. Rebak is a tiny private island off the southwest corner of Langkawi, a larger island off the west coast of peninsular Malaysia. If that sounds confusing, find us here: https://goo.gl/maps/fxKRrJ3xkVq or here: http://www.farkwar.com/boats/escape-velocity

The resort is beautiful, nestled among mature trees and lovely gardens. There’s a pool with a swim-up bar and a private beach, nature trails with plenty of wildlife and a daily wake up serenade by the considerable bird population. Yachties have our own Hard Dock Café and generous discounts at the hotel restaurants and bars. We have the run of the joint, plus our own services like a small chandlery, yacht and insurance brokers, and some limited technical and mechanical repair services. There’s a tiny gym and a couple of women lead yoga classes three times a week. The hard stand, where boats haul out of the water for bottom work or longterm storage, is one of the cleanest we’ve ever been in.

That sounds pretty posh, you’re thinking, the escapees must have hit the lottery. Nope. As shiny-pants as this is, we are living here for pennies compared to what any longterm marina stay would cost us elsewhere. Most of that is a result of the favorable economy, but we’re aided by a healthy discount the marina offers to boats that participate in the rally that brought us here in the first place. It’s a golden opportunity for Escape Velocity to experience the life of a marina queen (don’t let her hear you say that) and for us to work on projects or travel off the boat without the pressure of a mounting marina bill.

We love the pool, we love the beach bar, we love the multinational breakfast and dinner buffets, we love being in the trees. We don’t love not being able to walk to a cafe for coffee and a pastry, or to a market for fresh produce. There are no businesses on the island beyond the resort, and though there’s a tiny convenience store it mostly stocks snack foods for the resort visitors. That means a grocery or parts run is generally a day-long trek involving a short ferry ride to the big island of Langkawi, then either a rental car ($12.50 a day from Mr. Din, no questions asked) or a Grab car (like Uber) that’ll drive you to the shopping district clear across the island for $6. We like to take our folding cart so we’re not schlepping too many parcels, and a Grab car back to the ferry drops us right at the jetty.

It really couldn’t be easier but we do sometimes feel a little isolated and dependent on the ferry schedule. Then we go to the pool to cool off and read for a while and we forget all about the isolation thing and just feel lucky that we can enjoy this lush life on our budget.

Friends and family, feel free to book yourselves into the resort. We’ll meet you at the beach for sundowners.

After our fun trip to the Silk Island we asked Sambo to take us to the Russian Market, which turned out to be just another crowded, stuffy, sprawling warren of stalls just like every other SE Asian market. We wished we’d gone to the Central Market instead but by that time we were hot and tired and done for the day.

We spent our last evening having a ritual gin and tonic on the upper deck of the Foreign Correspondents Club, followed by a last dinner at the tiny, friendly Ethiopian restaurant. We know it’ll be a long time before we see Ethiopian food again.

Early the next morning Sambo picked us up for the run to the airport, most of which we spent in bumper to bumper traffic.

We had a short layover in Kuala Lumpur and were happy to see no queue at immigration. But when we got stamped back in, we were both warned by our respective officials that we would have to leave the country in six days when our original visas expire. No, we said, those visas were single entry and when we left the country they were void and now we’re eligible for new 90-day visas. Nope, they told us, you need to apply for extensions in Langkawi.

Now, I know this to be wrong. Ninety-day single-entry tourist visas are not renewable or extendable. That’s why we had to leave the country for seven days, to qualify for new visas. But we could see that the officers — who were conferring with each other in Malay– would not be moved and if we argued further we’d risk missing our connection. We took our passports and rushed to catch the flight to Langkawi.

In Langkawi, even though we arrived on a domestic flight, we presented ourselves at immigration and told them our tale of leaving for the required interval but being denied a new visa on arrival. The two agents we spoke with agreed that we should have been stamped for a new 90 days but shrugged and told us they couldn’t fix it. They advised we’d have to appeal to the main immigration office when it reopened on Sunday. It was now Thursday, and our current visas expire the following Wednesday. If we had to sail to Thailand we wouldn’t have much time to prepare.

The day continued to deteriorate when we took the escalator down to collect our luggage only to find our suitcase missing. Was it being held at Customs in Kuala Lumpur? In Phnom Penh it had been checked through to Langkawi but it definitely hadn’t made it here.

We filed a report at the baggage office, ordered a Grab car to the Rebak ferry, and finally made it home to Escape Velocity in time to drop off our backpacks and totes and get to the beach bar in time for happy hour. Our fun and relaxing vacation to renew our visas completely failed to accomplish its purpose, and we apparently sacrificed our luggage, too. More wine, please.

Overnight it occurred to me that we hadn’t listed our boat name on the lost luggage report so when I got up I walked over to the kiosk to give the ferrymen a heads up.

“The airline lost our luggage and they may send it on the ferry if they find it,” I told the guy on duty.

He pointed behind him and said, “Does it look like that?”

Hurrah! We had our luggage back, now it was on to solving our visa problem.

When Sunday rolled around we took the earliest ferry to Langkawi and a Grab car to the immigration office and arrived when they opened. We explained our dilemma and showed our passports. The clerk was puzzled and agreed that we should have been given new 90-day visas. She told us to take a seat while she consulted with her supervisor.

Forty five minutes and 6RM/each (about $3 total) later we have another 90 days to enjoy our new temporary home on Rebak Island, Malaysia. And life is good again.