October 2019 – SV Bob The Cat

Oriental adventures: four days in Penang

Temples, triads and Chinatown – in Malaysia, the closest you come to the orient is Penang Island. On this little island off the Malaysian west coast, Chinese settlers have been living for centuries, shaping the look, feel, smell and sound of the city of George Town.

Not wanting to miss an oriental adventure we stopped in George Town for four days, soaking up the atmosphere and seeing as much as we could cram in before heading further north to do boat work.

Penang has been a multicultural melting pot since the British got involved in the area in the 1700s. The largely uninhabited island was part of the Sultanate of Kedah when Francis Light of the British East India Company was scouting the area looking for a trading port. He persuaded the Sultan to trade it for military protection against the sultanate’s enemies, the Siamese from modern-day Thailand. After shaking hands on the deal, Francis hopped ashore from his wooden sailing ship, pegged a stick in the ground and renamed the lushly vegetated place Prince of Wales Island. There, he founded the city of George Town, creatively named after King George III. (Back then, blatant flattery was how you curried favour with the monarch, and owing to either very rigid customs or an astonishing lack of imagination successive British kings were called George for more than a hundred busy years of empire expansion, with the result that there are now many Georgetowns in the world.)

Kiwi kids standing guard in front of the Chinese temple guards.

As it turned out, Light didn’t have the full backing of his company and the promised military support failed to materialise, which led to the Sultan attempting to take back Penang. Light managed to fight him off and over the years the British East India Company expanded their territory to cover parts of the nearby mainland. The British were embroiled in trade wars with Holland at the time and Light made George Town a free port to lure traders from the Dutch trading posts in Indonesia, which at the time were operating as heavily guarded monopolies. To further spite the Dutch, and to boost business, spice plantations were set up on Penang and not long after it was established, George Town became the trading hub of the region.

Street mural from Chew Jetty, George Town.

Lured by opportunity (Chinese), and brought in by the British to do the dirty plantation work (Indians), settlers arrived, bustling into the compact centre of George Town, bringing along their unique culture, aesthetic, food and religions. The narrow streets of George Town became a fusion of cultures and cuisine, and Chinese and Indian districts quickly developed, supporting temples of every faith. Clans and secret societies blossomed, supporting opium dens and opulent mansions located just a stone’s throw from the more modest tin-working quarter, shoe-making alley and fish-vendor street.

David and the kids in front of the Han Jiang Teochew Ancestral temple.

Inside the Kuan Yin temple: red lanterns everywhere.

Today’s Penang is of course nothing like that of the past but we still found plenty to marvel about. The current population is 1.8 million people, of which 40% is Malay, 40% Chinese, 9% Indians and 9% ex-patriates from all over the world, with various other ethnicities making up the remainder. In George Town, more than half the population are of Chinese descent, and the old town has a distinctive oriental flavour. Turgid red paper lanterns drip from dark awnings and gilded Chinese lettering spill down the length of heavy wooden doors. Clan houses and temples are dotted everywhere, their elaborate terracotta roofs playgrounds for glittering dragons and scaled serpents, the silhouettes of which jut out sharply against the bright sky. In the temple front yards, intricately carved stone columns hold up heavy roofs and statuesque pudgy midget lions sit atop pillars, fangs bared and jaws parted in silent roars.

Roaring stone lions the size of small pigs.

George Town is often referred to as a ‘living museum’, and a large part of the old town was conferred protected status when it became a UNESCO world heritage site in 2008. Although 45% of Penang’s population is Islamic, it is the temples rather than the mosques that makes George Town famous. And the town has it all – with a huge Buddhist population (about 36%) and sizeable Hindu (9%) and Taoist / Chinese folk religion (5%) minorities, George Town is home to more temples and clan houses erected for ancestor worship than you can visit.

Matias in front of a Hindu temple in Little India, George Town.

Fierce-looking tiled ancestor on the wall.

We walk around the narrow streets in the searing heat of the midday sun, dipping in and out of cool, shaded courtyards of old Buddhist and Hindu temples. Slinking into the thick, incense-laden air of plush red temple interiors we view golden Buddhas and shining statues of peaceful-looking ancestors kept behind glass and admire wall paintings of warlike heroes with whiplike goaties raising swords against enemies hiding behind our shoulders. In the Hindu temples, where glitter and chaos rule, we admire the messy, multicoloured plasterwork that is everywhere, recognising the fleshy elephant and blue many-armed deities hiding behind piles of flower and food offerings stacked atop elaborate tinfoil-covered podiums. The temples are alive with worshippers who lie prostrate before carvings depicting ancestors and light incense sticks in the outdoor cast-iron fire pits; incense which they wave around with closed eyes, lips mumbling prayers, before inserting the sticks into the trays of sand lining the altars. Orange-clad monks can be seen from time to time in the Buddhist temples and bearded obese men wearing dhoti barely covering their bulk lurk in the dusty corners of the Hindu temples.

The 30-metre tall Kuan Yin statue at the Kek Lok Si temple overlooking George Town.

Inscriptions from the rocks on the hillside of the Kek Lok Si temple.

One of many gilded statues in the Kek Lok Si temple.

The biggest temple we visit is the hilltop Kek Lok Si temple, a myriad of buildings of worship including a seven-storey Pagoda containing 10,000 alabaster and bronze statues of Buddha, a turtle liberation pond and a 30-metre tall statue of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy of Mahayana Buddhism. Within the high-ceilinged halls lined with what must be literally millions of bronze Buddha statues, worshippers can buy slow-burning candles which presumably help to channel the prayers upwards into the heavens. Just like the opulent cathedrals of Christianity don’t tally with the message of Jesus, these incredible temples devoted to Buddha, a man who preached about freeing oneself from attachment to wants and worldly goods, seem incongruent. To my (admittedly non-religious) mind, nothing symbolises the painful admixture of lofty religious ideals with our all-too-human psyche better than the erstwhile Catholic habit of buying indulgences and the present-day Buddhist wishing ribbons, where you for only RM1 can purchase ‘booming business’ and ‘successful coupling’, as well as the perhaps more worthy ‘world peace’.

Wishing ribbons for sale in the temple. The most popular one, Success in Everything, had sold out.

Snippet of a wall in the great temple hall: along little inset shelves sit thousands of bronze Buddha statues.

A serene Buddha at the Kek Lok Si temple.

The living museum continues outside on the streets where beautiful murals cover many of the old, peeling plaster walls and wrought iron explanatory signs illustrate the city’s main sites of significance. The smell of food is everywhere, emanating from decrepit-looking hawker stalls clumped together in squares and along main streets from which vendors shout out the exotic-sounding names of their dishes: iconic Penang street food like assam laksa (tamarind-based noodle soup with seafood or chicken), mee curry (coconut seafood noodle soup), char kway teow (stir-fried rice noodles with shrimp), Hokkien hae mee (noodle soup with egg and seafood), wanton mee (dumpling noodles) and roti Canai (a south-Indian fried filled flatbread). At the front of the stalls are the raw ingredients: piles of pig blood sausage, cockles, cuttlefish, fungi and fish, and poorly exposed photos bleached by the sun show the wares, the images of soups in plastic bowls and piles of noodles on stained plates resembling those from a 1980s cookbook. More organised food halls are dotted all over the city; here stalls combine under one large roof, beers can be bought, and tables have numbers to which stallholders carry steaming dishes with proud smiles.

Living art: Lukie in an interactive street mural.

It is cheaper to eat out than to cook: a scrumptious dinner can be had for what amounts to NZ$4 and we sample everything we find. Popular with the kids are the claypot chicken, the roasted duck, and the stalls of Little India where samosas and onion bhaji are sold for pennies. It is Deepawali (Diwali) while we are there, the Indian festival of light, and Little India is fragrant with gajra, the flower garlands worn by Hindu women at festival time. Shops selling gold plating compete for customers with more traditional jewellers and the endless array of stalls selling shiny silken saris and elaborately embroidered salwar kameez in front of which matronly bhindied women stand, running the thick cloth over their knowing fingers whilst they bargain good-naturedly with the stallholder.

Multicoloured stalls set up for Deepawali.

All of this is normal business for the town, and the multicultural tourists blend in with the crows of locals. Whilst I don’t normally like tourist places much, here the foreigners fit in, the French, Japanese and Lithuanian mixing effortlessly with the plethora of local dialects and I am grateful for the relaxed dress code that comes with the Chinese which means that I can wear shorts and tank tops on our endless strolls in the 35-degree midday heat.

A trishaw driver asleep whilst waiting for a ride.

The cultural and religious tolerance of Penang seems incredible in today’s world, but on our last morning there I witness the limits. The Tesco supermarket near the marina features a ‘non-halal’ section hidden near the back, where bacon, ham and Chinese pork sausages are displayed and the kids and I joyfully pick a ham to enjoy at Christmas. At the check-out, the bhindied salwar kameez-clad woman serving us indicates with her hand for us to pick it up from the roller band ourselves; she refuses to touch the unclean item even though it is triple-wrapped in plastic. I sympathetically ask her if it is hard to deal with non-halal products and she shudders and smiles stoically, obviously determined to do her job despite the revolting, disgusting items bought by ignorant westerners.

Wrought iron signs explaining local sites of significance are dotted throughout the city.

Four days in Penang is not enough, but onwards we must go and the morning after watching the crushing defeat of the All Blacks with a group of flushed, sauvignon blanc-swilling, black-clad Chinese businessmen in one of the marina bars, we slide out quietly, looking back all the while, stealing a last glimpse of the town of temples and tolerance.

A less ornate street mural: Penang tolerance only stretches so far…

Boys’ boat blog: huge ships in Singapore Strait

Introduction

Singapore Strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and some of the biggest ships in the world use it! It is 105 km long and 16 km wide and around 2000 merchant ships go through it every day. A quarter of the worlds traded goods go through the Singapore Strait. The largest container ships in the world are about 400 m long and many of these go through the area.

Our AIS (Automatic Identification System) logs all the ships we meet in a 20-mile radius. We wanted to find out if:

Cargo ships are bigger than tankers
Longer ships are wider
Wider ships have deeper draughts
Smaller vessels travel faster
Cargo ships travel faster than tankers
There are more cargo ships than tankers.

Method

On 12 and 13 October 2019, we logged details from ships we met in the Singapore Strait for a period of 18 hours as we were sailing along. The things we logged were:

MMSI number (maritime mobile service identity – the ship’s unique identifier code)
Name
Length
Width
Draught
Speed
Position
Port of destination
Time
Type
Status, underway or at anchor
Latitude
Longitude
COG (course over ground)

We entered the data into an Excel spreadsheet where we analysed it for our boat school maths.

Results and discussion

We logged 132 ships in total, of which 18 were too far away to get the type (the AIS records more details as the ships come closer). 36 ships were heading to Singapore, and 18 to China. 16 were heading to places in Malaysia, some to Japan and some to Indonesia, as well as Australia, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and Brunei.

The pie chart below shows the number of each type of vessel.

Overall, we saw more tankers than any other ships, although cargo ships came close. All the other types of ships were very scarce. This makes sense because Singapore Port is the busiest cargo port in the world and almost a third of the ships were going there, and some of the other ships might have come from there.

The next graph shows the length versus the width of the ships.

The ships increase in width as they increase in length. According to our data, the width of a ship is about 19 per cent of the length, although it does vary.

The graph below shows the relationships between the draught and the width.

We assumed that the wider the ship is the deeper the draught. Our data showed that it was generally true, but it varied quite a bit.

The longer the ship, the wider it is. The draught has to be bigger on the bigger ships otherwise the ship will not be weighed down.

The next graph shows speed versus length.

One of our hypotheses was that smaller vessels travelled faster than larger vessels. This was proven to be false. The two fastest ships were small, about 40 metres long, and were ferries.

We wanted to see if there was a difference in the speed of cargo ships and tankers. The next graph shows this.

We thought that cargo ships travel faster than tankers, and we were right: the maximum speed of cargo ships was higher than tankers, but the tankers’ median speed was higher.

Below is a box plot showing the length of different types of ships.

Our last assumption was that cargo ships were bigger than tankers. This one varied a lot, but cargo ships beat tankers by more than 50 m, in terms of their maximum. The largest ship was 400 metres, so it was one of the largest ships in the world! The smallest cargo ship was much smaller than the smallest tanker, and the range of sizes in cargo ships was much larger than tankers.

Nowadays ships are reaching their maximum size. Too much bigger than 400 metres and the ship will not fit under any bridges, not fit through any canals, be very restricted to move, and will not be able to go in places much shallower than 20 metres. For example, a ship over 320 metres long cannot go through the Panama Canal, and a ship deeper than twenty metres cannot go through the Suez Canal.

Conclusion

We saw a lot of ships but if we continued plotting, we would have found many more. Most were recorded during the night. To make it more fun we pretended we were blowing them up so we needed all their statistics to find the right bomb.

Anambas – a final farewell to Indonesia

Kids revelling on one of the many rocks of the Anambas.

Other than accidents, ailments and ash clouds, it has been fantastic to return to the hectic chaos of Indonesia. Coming from Malaysia, the difference is noticeable – Indonesia is messier, busier, more crowded. And, maybe because Indonesia is less developed, the people seem friendlier. In fact, I am sure that Indonesians are the nicest people in the world.

On our first day in the Anambas capital of Tarempa, we shopped for supplies in the shaded fresh market to replenish our bare cupboards with luscious fruits and vegetables and our freezer with tempeh and meat. After carrying all our heavy shopping back through the crowded streets, weaving in and out of the dense foot traffic of masked, veiled women and school-uniformed children, and narrowly avoiding the burning ends of cigarettes flicked from motorbikes by careless riders, we finally reached the dinghy dock. As I put down my heavy bags and lowered the bulky rucksack from my sweaty back, a breathless young woman approached.

“Hello. You speak Indonesia?” she asked, tugging at my sleeve.

“Sedikit,” I said (a little) and smiled.

“Telur Anda ada di pasar,” she says, gesticulating towards the hinter streets.

“Oh,” I said, hand to my mouth. “She says we’ve forgotten our eggs, in the market.” I turned to David. “She’s right – we left them at that stand where we bought the chickens.”

I thanked the young woman profusely and made my way back to the market to pick up the eggs, leaving David to load the dinghy. As I wove in and out between open sacks of flour, large stacks of cabbage and buckets brimming over with onions, sidestepping spitting men wearing prayer caps and small children fingering plastic packaging, the stall holders called out to me. “Telur, telur,” eggs, eggs.

I nodded and smiled and finally got through the chaos to the elderly lady in whose stall I left the eggs. She grinned and made a telephone gesture, pointing towards the open street leading to the docks whilst firing off a rapid stream of Indonesian, indicating how she had called someone to go and find me at the harbour so that I could get my eggs. And there they were, two large stacked cardboard trays, neatly tied up with string, resting on top of a small freezer.

Birds taking off from a beach in the Anambas.

This kind of stuff is typical of Indonesia, where people go out of their way to help you. Crazy, amazing Indonesia, I think, how we will miss you! We have to leave because our one-month visa has run out and it is time for us to head to Malaysia. Which is a bit sad.

Not that there is anything wrong with Malaysia, by all accounts it is a nice country. It’s just that whenever I ask other cruisers about the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, where we are headed, they always say, “Well, Malaysia…,” scratching their heads, then looking up. “It’s a great place to do boat work!” before launching into detailed descriptions of chandleries, labour availability and re-upholstering options, and long-winded explanations of where to find chemical suppliers, hardware stores and sling lifts.

Kids swimming ashore in the Anambas. I doubt we’ll find anywhere like this in Malaysia.

It’s normally a bad sign when boat work is the most alluring part of a region. But we need to shine up the Bob, and as the repair manager onboard, David quickly gets busy asking probing questions about boat parts and buffing products and I enquire about provisioning and mosquitoes, wrestling my attention away from the quiet anchorage we’re on and vowing never to forget the beauty of Indonesia.

We are going to Malaysia to get Bob the Cat ready for selling. We plan to be back in New Zealand in January, ready for the kids to start the new school year in February, and before that we have a bit of touching up to do, including antifouling, cleaning, and a few cosmetic jobs.

Bob anchored in some of the clearest water we’ve ever seen.

Where David took the photo from. He and Lukie are the two tiny figures on the top of the rock, Matias is sitting nursing his wounded leg on the level below.

The Anambas has been a fitting final destination – Indonesia doesn’t get much better than here. Of the 225 islands in the island group, only 26 are inhabited, and the region is full of scenic deserted islands featuring white sand and wave-smoothed granite boulders piled up in aesthetically pleasing fashion along points and around corners. The centres of all but the smallest islands are green, coconut palms giving way to taller trees as you descend inland, your progress causing birds to squawk and circle and monitor lizards to slink away from their hot-rock sunbathing positions into deep, dark holes.

And the water, oh the water. Where the overland visibility suffered because of the forest fire smog, the marine waters were some of the clearest we’ve seen, with underwater visibility reaching 30-40 metres in places, pristine coral and plentiful fish life the backdrop to frolicking sharks, rays and turtles.

Perhaps the weirdest collection of marine life we encountered was at the Anambas Dive Resort, where the eccentric Chinese-Indonesian owner has established an open-air aquarium, a shallow one-hectare pool bordered by brick walls and open to the surrounding sea only through netted vents. In his enthusiasm for large marine life, the owner has been buying fish from the fishermen for years, and when we were there, the pool contained two 2-metre tawny nurse sharks, a 2.5 m shovelnose ray, giant groupers and stingrays, and packs of hungry-looking trevallies. It’s an expensive hobby, explained Hadi, the caretaker at the facility. One huge grouper cost them $400, but it died after three weeks, probably from overheating in the shallow water which could barely contain its girth. At one point, they had 70 blacktip reef sharks in the pool.

“They were just too aggressive,” laughed Hadi. “They ate everything else. All the other fish. Thousands of dollars’ worth of fish.” He looked at us. “So, we had to catch them all, with baited lines, and release them into the sea. Now, we only have one small blacktip. The nurse-sharks, do you know what they’re called in Indonesian?”

We shook our heads.

“Hiu bodoh,” he said, giggling. “It means stupid shark. It’s because they don’t have teeth. So, they are safe for us to keep, they don’t eat the other fish.” He threw his cigarette bud into water where it extinguished with a hiss and turned to show us the grouper and crayfish fattening ponds next to the open-air aquarium. These are another couple of hobbies: the owner is trying to figure out if he can make money from selling live seafood directly to Hong Kong. The dive shop is also just a hobby, set up less as a business and more for the guy to take his friends diving. Financing the whole operation is a refrigeration business run from next door, from where they sell refrigerated storage and ice to the region’s fishermen.

The main earners in the Anambas are fishing and tourism. No matter how remote our anchorage, and how deserted the island, we always saw fishing boats during our time there. And evidence of fishing too – one time we watched with curiosity a middle-aged man as he slowly worked his way around the edge of the bay where we were anchored during the course of a morning. He was in the water, wearing a mask, towing his little canoe along. After having spent about 4 hours in the water, he approached out boat on his way out of the bay, and we hailed him, asking what he was catching. He showed us a bucket of gelatinous globs and we frowned, trying to figure out what it was. Seeing glimpses of brilliant blue, I realised that they were clams – perhaps a hundred boring giant clams. Once we’d waved goodbye to him I jumped in the water and snorkelling the edge of the bay I saw evidence of his harvest: foot-long clam shells scattered everywhere, brilliantly white skeletons standing out against the backdrop of colourful coral on which they had been dropped. There were plenty of them, and I’m sure it’s legal, but still it was a sad sight.

Tourists come from Singapore, Malaysia and further afield, and on our cruise through the islands we saw multiple boats filled with wrapped-up Asian tourists jumping off small boats onto deserted islands.

I know that the whole world is busy showcasing their lives on Facebook and Instagram, but it seems to me that in south-east Asia it is taken to the extreme. One time, we were kitesurfing from a small, deserted island, and a boat load of six tourists arrived, phone and go-Pro in hand, selfie-seekers in paradise. They jumped on shore, each individual an isolated movie-maker, cameras held high, twisting this way and that, seated, lounging and standing in front of the sea, the sand, and our boat in the background. They stayed on the island about half an hour, filming away, during which time not one group shot was taken, nor any conversation had. The purpose of filming done, they hopped back onto the boat in silence and the boat boy drove them off, presumably in search of the next camera-friendly location for instant holiday shot upload to Facebook.

Holiday-maker selfying in Paradise, Bob the Cat in the background.

I don’t know where they are all staying – we only see one functioning resort. There is also a half-built eco-resort owned by a French-German couple with a couple of children who live in a tent on a small island near two semi-complete wooden structures which are meant for tourists. I’m not sure what the business plan for the place looks like, but their stated intention is to run a raw-food, survivor-style resort, catering for wealthy western clients keen to pay a fortune to rough it a week to return to nature. Committed raw-foodies themselves, the family survives on fresh fruit and vegetables, raw chicken and fish supplemented by small amounts of uncooked rice. They were very lean but otherwise healthy-looking and explained that for them the lifestyle is less about health and more about avoiding what they cited as ‘the unsustainability of cooking’. We wondered at the illogical turns of the human mind and sighed as we watched the fast supply boat come in laden with vegetables for them, thinking of the carbon burned as a result of them living remotely, as well as the environmental burden of international visitors, the carbon footprint of flights making tourism one of the least environmentally sustainable industries in the world. I guess it just proves that human beings are funny and logic has no real place in our lives.

Kids cooking up a fire so we don’t have to eat raw food. The raw food camp is on the island behind. They didn’t come to stop us even when the roasted chicken smells started to spread.

It is a holiday paradise, the Anambas, and we could stay here forever. For Indonesia, the waters are incredibly clean, and in the harbour of Tarempa a team of men were busy scooping up plastic from the harbour a couple of times a day. It is a refreshing sight, and so rare that we stopped to take photos: in our nine months here, this is one of the only times we have seen Indonesians remove waste from the marine environment rather than throw it in. Sadly, the education is limited to the capital and when we anchored in a more remote location, the local fishing boats would come into the bay to sleep at night, and as they chugged back out to sea in the morning they would leave behind a trail of floating plastic detritus. It is hard to understand how those closest to the reefs, the fishers who make their living and get most of their dietary protein from marine organisms, fail to understand that throwing plastic in the ocean is a bad idea.

By the time we left the Anambas, the surface haze had lifted and the sun was beating down on a windless sea. After six days with no swimming, Matias’s leg wound had healed enough for us to allow him into the water, and he had enjoyed the last of the brilliant visibility and abundant marine life on a couple of snorkels. We had collected three good rainfalls and had enough water in our tank to make it to Malaysia where our watermaker parts were waiting. So, it being time to leave, we waved goodbye, the final impression of Indonesia stamped onto our retinas a glassy sea reflecting fluffy clouds in the setting sun.

Lukie’s boat blog: slugs and snakes

On the reefs of Indonesia, a war is brewing.

Mr Flatworm is looking for the secret entrance to the meeting room. He needs to participate in war plans against the snakes. “Ah found it!”

Nudie does not usually go to meetings but this one is important. The snakes are going to eat them and Nudie is a good negotiator. He has made a plan of where to put the defences over the reef.

Meanwhile, King Moray is making a sneak attack plan. Eels and snakes are on the same team. He is going to send two assassins to go to kill two different targets. One is Queen Leafy, the other is the humans, the slugs’ two most powerful allies.

“Must go warn Queen Leafy!” says the Urchin Fish.

“Must go warn the humans!” says Frank. Sadly, Frank never knew the humans lived out of the water. He can’t go onto a boat, so the humans were never warned.

These tube worms are Evil Pit Monsters that are ready to eat slugs on a moment’s notice. They are in the deadly prisoner pit. Once the slugs are captured, they will be thrown in here.

Sneaky Snake gets ready to kill the humans that are his targets. They are on their command ship. Humans are huge and he is small but his poison can kill them.

In the secret meeting room everybody is restless. “Everybody calm down!” says King Glutton, who is the king of the sea hares.

“Uhh, this is not working.” He shouts: “ORDER IN COURT!”

Everybody is silent.

In the Leaf Head Palace, Queen Leafy is having some trouble. “Ahh! Go away,” she says to the Camouflaged Stalker. She knew she was being stalked but she hadn’t expected this!

“Never! I am here to kill you,” says Camouflaged Stalker.

“Die!” He lunges at Queen Leafy.

“I’ll save you!” shouts the jellyfish projectile fired by the slugs’ cannon. It smashes into the Camouflaged Stalker who swims away screaming: “It stings, it stings!”

On the humans’ command ship Sneaky Snake snuck along the top of the door but he slipped and fell on one of the human’s feet. The human shrieked and kicked him off. Suddenly a light was shining on him, he screamed “Ahhh! the light.” The humans plopped him into the sea.

“I’m scared,” says an innocent bystander, pretending to be a rock. He saw the slugs, Queen Leafy and the humans drive the snakes of the reef but he was still terrified.

“Ggggggooooooddddddbbbbbbbyyyyyyyeeeeeeee,” says the giant cuttlefish. Thanks for reading.

Trouble in paradise

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.

Rainwater collection system as viewed from the saloon.

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.

Terempa’s new waterside mosque in the haze.

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.

A large group of medics gathered around Matias’s leg.

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.