SV Bob The Cat

“Mummy, when are we going to be in clear water again?”

I sighed and look out over the horizon of masts spiking the low-hanging dark grey sky. The question, asked by Matias, is fair enough. Since leaving Indonesia we’ve been moving northwards along Peninsular Malaysia’s west coast, hopping from town to town, staying mainly in marinas. We’ve been in marinas in Puteri, in Pangkor, in Penang and in Langkawi. It’s a stark contrast to the deserted islands and crystal waters of the Anambas; here in Malaysia’s marinas, the water is thick and green and often covered in a membranous rainbow oil slick.

I shake my head. “Not sure,” I say, putting my arm around his shoulder. “Maybe in Thailand?”

Matias is not a fan of marinas, and I’m not either. They are hot and windless, dirty and crowded, full of insects and bird poop. Unlike anchorages, they are too close to land to allow a cleansing breeze to alleviate the heavy pressure of Malaysia’s 30 degrees C and 95% humidity, leaving us gasping for air whenever we’re on board. At dusk the mosquitoes come out, so every night just as the air cools to a reasonable temperature, we have to close the boat up tightly, our fine-meshed mozzie nets stifling whatever minuscule airflow is present. Not that we can keep the hatches open anyway – it rains almost every night here, so we lie sweating on damp sheets, beady droplets drawing lines on our glistening bodies in the tightly closed-up boat, the only airflow present that propelled by the faintly whirring fans.

Marina living is dirty, too. No matter how fancy the place – how nicely maintained the boardwalks, how neatly swept the paved paths, how immaculately kept the thick green grass – the close proximity to shore brings an endless amount of black child-sized footprints trailing up our white gelcoat from the dock to the cockpit. No matter how many mats I put down and how many admonishments I issue the footprints continue over the cockpit seats and into the saloon. It’s not just our foot soles that are dirty; after more than a year of water living we are used to having white-clean nails but now that time is gone and we find half-moons of shore dirt imposing on the tips of our fingers, wedges of black impossible to dislodge from the children’s toenails no matter how hard we scrub.

Of course, there are mitigating factors. There are the amenities, the flushing toilets that are nice to use, the one-push-and-its-all-gone a novelty that only fades slowly, approximately at the same rate as our hands soften with the waning of the toilet pumping calluses. Invariably, though, marina toilets are situated too far away – no matter which berth we are assigned, the nearest toilets are never less than a mile away. There are showers, too, with good pressure cold and sometimes lukewarm water under which we stand for long minutes on end, savouring the feel of fresh water cascading over our skin. The drawbacks to the showers are the mosquitoes hanging around in the perma-shade and the mouse-sized cockroaches that lurk in the drain, only to scoot out when I switch on the water, causing my heartbeat to shriek into sudden arrhythmia. On the boat, there is endless fresh water and electricity, which means that we can splurge when doing the dishes and use whatever power tool we want.

The latter is the reason we’re there, and I’m sure that the circumstances flavour my impressions of marina living. We are coming to the end of our journey and there are a thousand small things that we need to do to the boat to get it ready for sale. So, we’ve been hopping along from marina to marina, receiving parcels in one place, shopping for parts in another, settling in to do boat work in a third.

Working on the boat whilst you’re living in it is a bit like living in a house you are renovating – dirty and unpleasant, but cheaper than the alternative. So we put up with the clouds of sanding dust and varnish fumes, the endless drone of power tools, the living space so crowded with tools and brushes that there is no place to sit, the kitchen that is covered in drop sheets and masking tape.

Despite Matias’s dislike of marinas, the kids normally have fun there. Many places have swimming pools and most have large areas covered in concrete perfect for skateboarding. There are other boat kids too, and while the adults work, the kids roam free in large gangs, busily swimming, skating and exploring.

There are, of course, things to see here. You can catch taxis inland and explore tourist attractions, take long walks, visit waterfalls, scale small peaks in the searing heat. But with all the work we have on we tend to limit our excursions to shopping for boat bits, and so the only local attractions we see are busy shopping malls, the touristy beachfronts, and the creatures one finds in marinas.   

Of these, the humans are the least charming. Normally, yachties are interesting people. They are the sort of men and women who make their dreams a reality, who get up and go, who are not afraid to grab life by the helm and steer into the unknown. They are people who choose their life rather than fall into it by default, doers not gonnas, the kind of people who are interested in nature and people and culture, who love exploring, who marvel at the wonders of the world. They are self-sufficient and capable, competent and sensible, not afraid of a life lived a bit differently, without too many safety nets. They are lovely people, interesting and interested, and a joy to meet.

Yachties like that tend to stop only briefly in marinas. They come there if they have some work to do on the boat, if they need to pick up visitors, or if they need a place to leave their yacht while they go overseas for a while.

There is another variety of yachtie in marinas, though. These are the ones that are stuck, for one reason or another. On our travels across the world’s oceans we have encountered a few places where people tend to get lost, the Hotel Californias of marinas and sheltered anchorages. St Maarten in the Caribbean is one example – most of the boats we met there never went anywhere. The marinas of Malaysia are the same. Here, unwary boaties find themselves stuck for years and we meet many of them. Presumably once proud and cheerily full of good posture and great spirit, they are now scowling weirdoes, ageing men and women walking with humped backs and a permanent grim expression etched onto their forehead. Their faded clothing and narrowed eyes speak of years spent hatless in the strong tropical sun. They normally walk with a spanner in one hand and a beer in the other and spend their time tinkering away on endless boat jobs whilst remaining pleasantly sozzled on the duty-free beer. They form close-knit groups whose collective waistlines slowly expand in tune with the dwindling of their bank accounts as they meet up at happy hour, red-faced and ruddy, to complain about the lack of skills of the local workforce. From Malaysia there are not many places to go – once you’ve exhausted Thailand, the only way forward here is across messy Indonesia or into the blue of the Indian Ocean, both of which are longer trips requiring planning and a seaworthy vessel, a daunting prospect for many. All this make the marinas of Malaysia places where trips are ended, dreams are packed up, stuffed into crates and shipped home, or just allowed to slip away imperceptibly, fizzling out like the bubbles in a can of beer left open in the strong summer sun.

In our marina hopping north, we’ve met countless yachties who have left the return to shore too long. They don’t tend to enjoy themselves an awful lot and don’t much like where they’re stuck. They dislike Indonesia and Malaysia because the anchorages are deep. Because the people are Muslim. Because the mosques are loud, the women wear burqas. Because the officials are difficult. Because people don’t speak English everywhere. Because you can’t buy cheese in many places and mayonnaise is difficult to find. We listen and nod and wonder if they went to the same places as us, the amazing sites of clear water and wonderful marine life, of beautiful people and incredible sunsets, white beaches and lushly vegetated peaks.

“I didn’t rate Indonesia,” said a woman I met in the marina lounge in Puteri.

“But we saw some amazing marine life!” I said. “Did you see the mantas, the whale sharks, the turtles?“

She shook her head, her mouth set in a permanent downward expression. “We have plenty of good marine life in Queensland where we’re from,” she said. “And there, I can get my cheese!”

I wondered silently why she and her husband didn’t just stay in Australia, where they can buy mayonnaise by the litre and don’t have to meet people of a foreign religion who don’t speak English? Seems a pity to go all this way only to hate every step of the journey because it isn’t back home. After all, what is the point of travelling if you don’t want to see anything new?

The non-human marina life is a little more rewarding. The green water is full of little fish, whose outlines we can only just make out as they swim centimetres below the surface. More exciting are the large yellow-striped monitor lizards that sit calmly sunning themselves on the intertidal rocks of marina walls. Some of them are over a metre long. Resting motionless they recharge their thermal batteries before slipping silently into the opaque water as we approach, hiding under dark pontoons or swimming languidly about amongst floating plastic rubbish, their large feet trailing behind as the body snakes itself forwards surprisingly fast. In one marina, one of the lizards was floating, bloated belly up, in the thick green water.

“I think he died because he was too fat,” said Lukie, looking up at me doubtfully.

In the marina in Penang, a family of sea otters shrieked loudly, their high-pitched barks competing with the squealing of ropes stretched taut in the resonating marina swell. As we sat watching mesmerised, the otters climbed out onto the pontoon and deposited their fish catch, after which they engaged in loud arguments about who got to eat it, a hissing and screeching fest that only ended when the large marina crows started circling very low. Protesting loudly at the enormous dark birds, the otters slipped into the water, leaving behind a couple of half-eaten fish carcasses and a stinky mess of soft poop slowly spreading over the jetty in the light rain.  

There are birds everywhere. The marinas seem to be colonised by crows rather than seagulls in this part of the world, although colourful hornbills have the upper territorial hand in Rebak Marina, Langkawi. Here, pairs of hornbills flew in tandem, settling loudly into swaying treetops, squawking and screeching as they courted the day away.

On the few anchorages we frequented in between marinas there was amazing life too. In Pulau Paya, just south of Langkawi, a lone dolphin came up to the boat in the early morning as we were untying from a mooring. We often see dolphins in Malaysia, but they tend to be quite shy. This one wasn’t – it wanted not just to ride our bow wave but to play with us. It kept circling the mooring, pushing the float with its snout, looking at us with beady eyes as it came up again and again for breath. When it stayed by the boat even after we drifted off the mooring we jumped in, and to our delight, the dolphin stayed to play. It circled us, whirling up the water, spinning us faster and faster as it wound us in a web of bubbles, its body passing only a few centimetres from our hands. We dived down and it followed, torpedoing itself through the water, spinning and circling us as we slowly floated back up for air. Wherever we swam it followed, doing small leaps out of the water as it sped past us only to slam on the breaks and cut right in front of our bodies when we got too slow. It was full of joy, showing off its superior swimming skills, good-naturedly laughing at our clumsiness as it patiently humoured our attempts to keep up.   

The kids yelped and splashed, frantically trying to outswim the dolphin with front crawl and foamy fins, diving after it with outstretched hands, the dolphin staying just outside of their reach but waiting for them whenever they started lagging. It was hilarious, a dolphin acting like a well-trained playful dog, a bored intelligent mammal looking for friends to share a bit of light-hearted playtime. We wondered what made it so – whether the locals feed it and why it was there all by itself; normally dolphins hang out in playful gangs, not unlike kids at a marina. When we finally left the anchorage it accompanied us for a mile or two, swimming not at our bow but alongside the cockpit, looking up at us beseechingly before peeling off and heading back to its island.

It’s a nice reminder of all the beautiful elsewheres out there. After a solid month of marinas, it is time for us to go off in search of a little nature, a bit of fun. There are boat jobs we can do on anchor and we better do them there, escape the marinas for a while. Otherwise, we might end up all weird and never escape at all.

It happened this morning, around nine o’clock. The boys had begged off home-schooling and had already made and eaten pancakes and jumped in the sea for over an hour. Whilst they were in the water a light rain started falling, and they climbed out, rushing inside to dry off and get changed. We had plans to do a walk and David and I were idly considering whether the rain was likely to worsen. He was gazing out over the horizon when suddenly he furrowed his brow.

“Holy cow,” he said, standing up abruptly.

Alerted by something in his tone, Matias stood up, following David’s gaze. “It’s a tornado!” he yelled.

“It’s a waterspout!” said David, awe in his voice.

I rushed outside to have a look. About 2 miles off the boat, a thick, black cloud hung low over the teal coloured ocean. As we watched, the cloud’s heavy lower reaches spiralled down towards the sea, and a solid wave of dark grey water rose, sea and cloud connecting in a long, spindly funnel constantly thickening and slimming, snaking its way over the water.

Matias grabbed the binoculars and made for the deck when suddenly he screamed. I looked over and saw that he had fallen on the way out of the cockpit and he sat crouched over, clutching his leg.

“Oh no,” I said soothingly. “Oh, I am sorry, that must hurt.”

“Don’t look, Mummy,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s really bad. Really bad. I need a Band Aid.”

I ran inside to fetch some paper towel and the disinfecting wound spray while David bent over him. “We need iodine,” David yelled. “And some gauze.”

Dropping the paper towel I went downstairs to grab the medical kit. I ran out and put the box next to David, who was standing over Matias clamping shut a wound with his hand. Blood was pulsing out either side of his fingers, and when he released the pressure to drop iodine into the wound I saw a deep, bloody gash, about five centimetres long, which ran along his shinbone. As the wound opened it became apparent that the shin was cut to the bone. In amongst the blood welling up, I could see some weird white blobby fat tissue. I looked at the scene of the accident – a softly curved plastic edge of the inbuilt seat, no protrusions, no metal, no glass. How on earth did he cut himself on that?

“This will need stitching,” said David tersely.

I nodded. “We’ll have to go to Terempa.” The small township of Terempa, the capital of the sparsely populated Anambas archipelago, was about 20 miles away.

“But what about the waterspout?” said Matias. “We can’t move the boat, we might hit the waterspout!”

“It’s getting closer!” yelled Lukie. “Mummy, the tornado will get us!”

I fetched some steri-strips and as David fastened them and tied a bandage on top, we watched the waterspout progress across the horizon. Snaking this way and that, it wove its way from west to east. The few local fishermen in the bay started calling out from their little kayaks, waving their hands, pointing and shouting. I waved back, indicating that we had seen it and the bay quietened as we all sat passively in a windless void, watching the weather progress, its path governed by gusts local to the cloud.

The system stayed a couple of miles away from our bay and within fifteen minutes the funnel-like spout dissipated into a heavy grey curtain suspended between the sea and the cloud. We drew heavy sighs of relief.

I fed Matias a dose of paracetamol and as I closed up the medical kit I reflected how lucky we were that we had any medicines left.

When we had checked into Indonesia three weeks previously, two Customs agents had come onboard to check out the boat. After taking a few selfies with the kids they asked to see our alcohol and medical supplies. We showed them the beer cupboard and I handed them one of our first aid kits and a box of medicine.

The older of the two looked through the packets with a frown on his face. He looked at me seriously over his black-rimmed glasses, holding out a pack of Strepsils.

“Tenggorokan sakit,” I said. Sore throat.

“Expired,” he said, waving the packet at me. “Look.” He pointed to the date stamp which read 21 June 2019. He spoke rapidly in Indonesian to his partner and held out the packet for him to see.

“Yes, but they are still good,” I said. He looked uncomprehending – his English was very limited.

“Bagus,” I said. Good. “Still bagus, tidak rusak.” Good, not damaged.

“Expired,” he said again. He rummaged further into the box and found a packet of Fucidine, an antibiotic cream. Clicking his tongue he held it up, waving it in my face. “Expired!” he said angrily.

I read the faint writing. March 2019. I sighed. “Yes, but still bagus. Not bad, tidak rusak. For infection. Still works.”

He looked at me accusingly and threw the packets on the table. Obviously not good enough.

I smiled. “Bagus bagus,” I said as I quickly gathered the packets with my right hand, holding out my left hand for the box which he was still rummaging through. “No hard painkillers, just paracetamol.”

He narrowed his eyes and spoke more Indonesian to his partner as he loosened his grip on the box.

“Bagus,” I insisted, sternly smiling as I snatched the kit out of his hand and swiftly turned my back to repack it. There was no way I was going to let him have our medicines.

Apparently, Customs and Biosecurity in these reaches take it upon themselves to confiscate expired medicine from yachts, with a view to sell it locally to augment their meagre income. Other yachties are wise to the trick and have a fake medicine box containing a few useless creams to give away, hiding away their real stash of serious medicine. Having never heard of uniformed medicine pilferers I had naively given them a genuine medical kit, and as I handed the pills to Matias I felt lucky that I got to keep my old drugs.    

We’ve needed a few medicines while we’ve been in the Anambas. A couple of days after arriving here I picked up a terrible head cold, which saw me suck on out-of-date Strepsils and eat expired paracetamol by the handful. Two weeks later, Lukie succumbed to a hideous tummy bug causing near-instantaneous spray-vomiting of anything and everything he swallowed, for which I was eyeing up the rehydration sachets nestled deep in the pack. And now Matias’s injury, on which David poured lavish helpings of iodine which apparently expired late 2018.

It is obviously time to review our medical supplies and replenish out-of-date stock but that must wait until we are somewhere more developed.

With the waterspout safely dissipated, we made our way to Terempa, the capital of the Anambas to get Matias’s leg sown up.

The rainy weather had only started a week before and for once we were happy to see rain: our water maker had broken. That morning, a week earlier, I woke up in the early hours to a low humming sound. My sleepy subconscious registered a change of tone in the pre-dawn background noise. Was it waves? Or a boat nearby? I opened my eyes wide and reached up to switch off the loud fan that tends to drown all other night-time noises around our boat. Once the fan was off, I could clearly discern a low drumming sound.

Rain! I jumped out of bed. “Rain!” I shouted as I scrambled upstairs. “David! Rain!”

I ran outside and checked the sky. Yep – a monstrous black cloud blanketed the town of Terempa off which we were anchored, the feeble rising sun on the eastern horizon only emitting faint light under the heavy cloud cover. “Rain!” I called again.

A bleary-eyed David stumbled up the stairs, closely followed by Matias.

“Daddy!” Matias shouted. “Rain!” He jumped out on deck and danced, the chilly droplets beading his hair, goose-bumps forming on his arms.

Stifling a yawn, David rubbed his stubble briefly before springing into action. He grabbed a funnel, jumped on deck and started wrestling a large tarpaulin on the foredeck, stringing up corners and stretching it tight.

“Grab that corner, Matias,” he yelled, pointing, his drenched figure dim against the grey beyond. Standing still behind sheets of rain Matias fastened a corner and tied it onto the railing, then fumbled to attach the corner to the halyard while David tied on another corner. Matias jumped to hoist the halyard while David weighted down the front of the tarpaulin and ran to get place funnels and guide translucent plastic piping. Lukas, meanwhile, had come into the cockpit to join me in hauling out fish bins, tubberware and salad bowls, placing containers to catch the rivulets of water dripping from the edges of the bimini. Within fifteen minutes the boat was full of plastic ware and piping and we gathered in the cockpit to dry off.

We needed the rain badly. Our water maker had broken two days before, about ten days into our stay in the Anambas, and our water levels were getting low. It was the pump that was broken, and there was no way to get spare parts, or a new pump, in this remote location – the nearest place was Singapore, two days’ sail away.

It wasn’t just us that were getting thirsty. The Anambas island group had not had rain in three months, and in the capital town of Terempa, people were queueing up to buy drinking water, whilst all over the islands, people were digging to find groundwater in ever-deepening wells.

In fact, it seemed most of Indonesia was praying for rain. Uncontrollable forest fires were raging on Borneo and Sumatra, leading to a cloud of low-hanging particulates that suffocated large swathes of the region. The ash cloud had been hovering over north-western Indonesia, reaching into Malaysia and Singapore, causing widespread school closures (600 schools closed in Malaysia alone) and health warnings for pregnant women to gather in air-conditioned government shelters until further notice, lest their breathing suffocate their unborn children.

Located between Borneo and mainland Malaysia, the remote Anambas island group was no exception. In our first week there, the whitish haze steadily increased, the visibility dropping day by day, with fewer and fewer of the archipelago’s islands noticeable from our anchorage in eastern Anambas, until one morning we woke to find the boat suspended in nothingness as we struggled to see a mile through the mist. Every morning, the deck was freckled brown by fallen ash, our feet congealing the dirt into prints that I spent hours scrubbing out with the saltwater hose.

The rainy weather heralded a change, the heavy droplets cleansing the air, the winds pushing the smog away from the islands. By the time Matias hurt his leg, a couple of refreshing rain showers had replenished the water tank, the plethora of tubing, tubberware and tarps steadily leading water from the deck, the bimini and the roof into our hold. When we’re careful, we use about 30-40 litres of water a day, and as the tank holds 800 litres we felt smugly satisfied that we had collected enough to survive for another couple of weeks.  

It took us four hours to reach Terempa from where we were anchored when Matias hurt his leg. When we got there, we rushed him into the public hospital. It was a brand new building with a high roof, painted a cheerful blue with white trim. The place was largely empty, the only other patient a middle-aged woman lying on a bed in the corner, a drip attached to her arm. The moment we arrived we were surrounded by staff. A few of the doctors spoke a bit of English and we managed to communicate the situation – there was a wound, we thought it needed stitches. They guided Matias to a bed and a large group of what must have been the majority of the medical staff at the facility formed around him. Two doctors wearing scrubs peeled back the bandage and set to work urged on by the excited chatter of the remainder of the group. Within half an hour the wound was cleaned and stitched and we had been given a course of antibiotics and some painkillers to take home. When we tried to pay, they waved us away, shouting ‘gratis, gratis,’ free, free.

The stitches looked great. When we got back to the boat the rain had started up again and David rigged up the collection system once more, urging all available drops into our tank. We felt relieved that getting medical assistance had proven straightforward and looked forward to leaving the township behind. Tomorrow we’ll head off to see the last of the Anambas.