After a week of just sailing around Langkawi doing little navigation drills such as finding your way through tight areas and not grounding the boat, setting a course to steer to a mark you couldn’t see without being able to change course and be within a certain distance of it, and finding a channel at night based on depth contour lines off the chart and another week of classroom theory, it was decided we should really do a bit a sailing since that’s what we were here for. We all received an email Sunday giving us Latitudes and Longitudes for which we should plan our individual bit of the trip as the boat captain. Mine turned out to be going from Penang to Langkawi at night. The plan was to do all this in 60 hours. We did a continuous 2 legs over 36 hours around a Malaysian Navy Base at the edge of Malaysia that we rounded. As we rounded the Navy base we got a call on the VHF radio asking very nicely but firmly who were we and what were we doing out here from a local Navy Frigate. It certainly broke up the monotony. Then it was onto Penang. Of course we had to go around to the shallow side at low tide and under a few bridges to make sure we were wide awake before ending the two legs. That gave us 10 hours of rest before we set off for a 14 journey back. Did anyone know Penang is a diurnal tidal region? That means after 10 hours your right back in the low tide zone. This ensured we would be coming out of an area in Penang that is very busy with commercial shipping at low tide. Did I mention the areas out of the shipping channel are very shallow? You don’t want to make things too easy. The tricky bit around Penang turned out to be finding where to exit the navigation channel so we could split the 2 islands up North. It would make for a bad night if you ran onto them. We had pretty stiff winds all the way back, had the wind gauge reading 23 knots at one point. A light force 6.
At least the boat moved fast. Amazingly enough I managed to set the course correctly and we split the two islands and upon arrival in Langkawi were about .2 miles from where I had actually planned on arriving. Happy, smiling and exhausted we pulled into the Marina. After the boat was put away I think everyone crashed out and slept all day. Heroic quantities of beer were consumed by one and all that night which put us all back to sleep early. Sometimes the best scenery in life is what you see inside your eyelids. Adieu.
My Road 