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On our second leg

We have now been on the second leg of our journey for one week. It has been a very fascinating but also tiring week. We left Subic Bay on Monday 1 May, and have not been at a marina or dock since – there have been none heading up the northern coast of the Philippines. We have been at sea for four nights, and have anchored for three. We have had times of no wind, but also some rough conditions when rounding the northwestern corner of the Philippines. We have managed to get some fuel along the way, with locals bringing it to the boat in jerry cans. We’ve also managed to stock up on the lovely fresh fruit that the Philippines are known for, again with locals going to the market with our shopping list and bringing the goods to us for a small fee. However, there has been no place to fill our water tanks, which means that we are only using water as and when truly needed. I won’t say how many days we have gone without showering, but in the words of a friend, showering is overrated anyway…Also, if it gets to be too much, a dip in the ocean helps too.

We will write a longer report about the places we have anchored when we have better access to the internet, and more time on our hands. Right now, we are in the process of clearing out of the Philippines, and readying ourselves for an offshore passage.

Fuel delivery.
Fruit delivery and rubbish collection all in one.
Lil Sis snorkeling at one of the anchoring spots.

 

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Waiting game

Lil Sis is enjoying her school camp in mainland China, and between her drop off and pick up, part of the family are on a shopping spree in Hong Kong. It is not the kind of activity that one imagines when thinking of Hong Kong and shopping though; they are running around the city’s alleys buying (yet more) spare parts for the boat! It can be a challenge to find technical tools and items in Hong Kong. There are no large DIY or hardware stores, and instead you find that for each item, there is one (back)street where everyone sells that item but almost nothing else. So when you have 20 items to buy, it requires significant local knowledge to find everything, and even then it can be very time-consuming. Nevertheless, it seems infinitely easier to buy spares and other small items from Hong Kong than from the Philippines.

The boat has been around Subic Bay for almost three weeks, and we are starting to get rather itchy feet. The weather analysis has started again in earnest, and considering our success finding bad weather en route to the Philippines, we are taking it very seriously. However, the challenge with sailing is that waiting for the “perfect” weather window may mean not getting out at all, and even perfect windows are not guarantees of good sailing conditions (as we have just learnt the hard way).

All small repairs on the boat have been made, and we have acquired a sea anchor as a replacement for our trusted series drogue which was unfortunately lost when we tried to retrieve it in rather large seas on the trip to the Philippines. Drogues are notoriously difficult to retrieve, and we probably should have waited for calm seas before even attempting to retrieve ours, but by the time the weather started to show signs of easing, we were so ready to get on our way – not to mention ready to exit the hell that is being tied to a drogue in big seas! – that we just couldn’t resist the urge to get it off.

We are now also starting to go through our departure checklists. What shall we eat during our next passage? How much water do we need to carry on board? We have a water-maker, but it is still in a “pickled” (i.e. long-term storage) state, and we need to get it going once underway (it is not a good idea to un-pickle a water-maker in dirty marina water). We need to get fuel, and the propeller needs to be scrubbed once more to remove any sign of barnacles which grow with amazing speed in these tropical waters. We need to handle administrative tasks in the current marina, and need to inform coming ports of our arrival. Are we comfortable that we have paper charts of the right scale for our next leg and do we need further pilot books for port arrival? Are seacocks in a good state and do our bilge pumps work properly? What about fire and gas alarms, and our emergency devices such as EPIRBs and PLBs? Are all the communications equipment in good working order, likewise our chart plotter and autopilot? Do we have enough gas to cook food on the next leg? The list goes on and on.

Whereas the stress factor is high, the excitement over what lies ahead grows exponentially. We hope the waiting game will soon be over and our bow will once again be pointed towards news horizons.

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Ten days in the Philippines

We have now been docked in Subic Bay for ten days. We have spent a lot of that time repaying our sleep debt, and just generally resting, and we are finally starting to feel that we are back to normal. Of course, boat work has been piling up, and although we have slowly been working our way down the list, new action items are as usual being added to it.

We have met some lovely people here, both ones involved in boating, and others who have nothing to do with boats. We have been lucky enough to be invited into two very different homes in the area, giving us a tiny glimpse into the differences in the way locals and expats live. People here are generally very friendly, but as there are really not many foreign tourists around, we do sometimes feel that we stick out like a sore thumb.

We are likely to stay in the Philippines for a couple of weeks still, as we are waiting for the delivery of some spare parts, and also because Lil Sis has another school event that she needs to return to Hong Kong for five days for. We are quite enjoying Subic Bay, and it is a location that doesn’t weigh too heavily on a sailor’s budget either.

Sunset at the marina.
Olongapo street view.
Tasty local food.
Locals have closed off one lane in order to dry rice on the conveniently flat, hot surface.
Pay-by-weight laundry shop, efficient and cheap.

 

 

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Looking forward

When we were hit by the gale on our way to the Philippines, we made the decision to alert the maritime rescue authorities to our predicament, as drifting without the ability to maneuver a boat in a very busy sea area is inherently dangerous (for us, but also for the other vessels). Would there later have been a need to issue any automatic emergency alerts (which thankfully there was not), those would have gone to the authorities in Finland where our boat is registered, so we chose to include the Finnish authorities in our alert at the outset. We are very pleased to have done so, as we received efficient and empathetic support from them over a communications system that the local authorities were unable to use to get messages through to us. However, the involvement of the Finnish authorities has led to our trip becoming an item of interest for the media in Finland, up to the point that our previous blog post about the Philippines leg of our journey has been quoted by the local press. We have therefore reluctantly had to make the decision not to elaborate further on the events from that leg on this blog. Instead, you can ask us over a cold beer or glass of wine next time we meet!

To that end, this blog post is about radios (again), but I will keep it short this time. We are over the moon as we managed to get our MF/HF (i.e. long-range) radio to finally work together with our pactor modem, and  successfully sent the first email through our radio! It seems like some sort of small miracle to be able to send emails through radio waves. We can now send and receive emails basically for free through private radio stations while we are at sea. These emails cannot be long, and cannot contain images or attachments, but will certainly work as reassurance to family and friends that all is well with us. We are now trying to sort out a way to update this blog (with very concise posts) through our radio while underway.

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Ahoy from the Philippines!

Sorry for the long blog silence, but the reason for it is that we have (finally) been at sea.

On 11 March, I wrote about the conditions that we did NOT want to encounter on the first leg of our trip. I explained that our fear of the first leg turning into a nightmare was the reason why we waited and waited for a good weather window. Eventually, we decided that instead of attempting to get to Taiwan directly, we would sail to the Philippines first, since going south would ensure nicer sailing conditions.

Well, suffice it to say that things did not exactly go according to plan, and despite changing our first destination port and sailing direction, we were completely unsuccessful in avoiding the nightmare conditions I so casually outlined in my post a few weeks back.

We left on the first leg of our sailing voyage on Wednesday the 29th, and arrived in Philippines, yesterday. A trip that was meant to take five days took us ten as we were battling Force 8 winds and 6-metre waves for three nights and drifted over one hundred nautical miles away from our destination. Hunkered down below in a cabin where the temperature was 29 degrees and humidity 75%, with helmets on our heads and mattresses against the cabin walls waiting for the waves and wind to knock down the boat, we swore that we would sell the boat as soon as (and if) we got to land.

Fortunately, with a couple of good meals in our bellies and the comfort of a warm shower here in the Philippines, none of us is of that opinion any longer, and we just feel immense gratitude that we survived the situation and have come through it stronger than before. I suppose there is something to be said for having the worst experience at the outset, because once you get through it, you know you can get through it later again.

We are also in awe of having witnessed the camaraderie of seafarers (such as immediate offers of assistance by commercial vessel captains who we were hailing on VHF to inform them that we are drifting), not to mention the efficient and compassionate support given to us over satellite communications by the Finnish and Hong Kong Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres. We are thankful and humbled by these experiences.

I do intend to write a full report about what happened at a later date, but right now we are again working on the boat (nothing major broke, but there are lots of small bits and pieces to fix) and on healing ourselves both physically and mentally.

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Communication issues

Be forewarned that this very long post is all about radios and satellite communications equipment, which some may find boring (I wish it actually was boring and straightforward, but this is a notoriously complicated field, which our experiences are proof of!).

Perhaps naively, after hours and hours of installation work (credits to Mr Finn) and programming (that is me) we thought we were sorted in respect of our radio and communications gear…Well, now that we have had spare time on our hands, we’ve realised that we are not quite there with either of our two long-distance communications devices.

Firstly, there is our long-distance radio (for those who do not understand boat communications, I’ll add that we also have a short-distance radio on the boat, but its range is only around 60 nautical miles, so it will do us no good when we are far from land and other boats). We are able to receive both voice communications and digital selective calls on our long-range radio, so we thought everything was fine, until we made a call to Brunei Bay Radio to try out our pactor modem set-up. A pactor modem basically works like the modems that we had in the nineties to connect to one another (remember the good old days before the internet?), which make screeching sounds and then almost magically  – although very slowly – churn out text that the person on the other end has written. So it is a fantastic piece of kit to have on board, assuming you get it to work! Our computer nicely speaks with our pactor modem, which in turn nicely controls the long-range radio. However, despite trying out several frequencies and double-checking radio propagation statistics (don’t ask!), the coast radio station never answered. That was hit number one, but we figured that that could still be down to Hong Kong “noise” on the radio frequencies. However, then we managed to schedule a DSC test call with the Hong Kong Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (they don’t routinely allow such tests, so we are really grateful that they helped us out). This was a test call on the real distress frequency, and having made sure we got the settings correct so that we didn’t make a real emergency call, we sent off our DSC call and started to wait for the HKMRCC acknowledgement, the whole family eagerly gathered around our navigation station to witness the moment. To our huge disappointment, the acknowledgement never came, meaning that they did not receive our DSC call. That was hit number two, and we are now rather puzzled as to what the error might be, particularly considering that we can happily receive DSC calls ourselves – the latest proof of which is a distress call received from an unknown source this very morning (see photo)!

Hit number three came in the way of our Inmarsat Mini-C equipment. This is in simplistic terms a satellite-based messaging system. We can really nicely receive meteorological and navigational warnings through the system, so thought everything was ok. However, we’ve now realised that our routine messages (such as satellite emails, with the help of which we could potentially update this blog while on the ocean) are not going through. Link tests, which test the set-up all the way from our mobile station through to the satellite and onwards to a land earth station, show no problems, so we are again unsure as to what the issue can be.

None of this will prevent us from taking off (Lil Sis finishes her music event tomorrow, after which we are SO READY to go, weather permitting!), since we are getting the weather and navigational data, have got several duly-registered satellite beacons to get distress messages out and also have a handheld satellite phone with which to send reports to our emergency contacts. Distress messages on the Inmarsat Mini-C system are also likely to go through (the problem is probably only with routine messages). However, the communication problems will ensure that there is no break from the boat work, which in all honesty we would have rather needed. We are starting to feel like we are in need of a holiday…

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Could be worse

Since we are stuck in Hong Kong, we are making the most of it. And, to be honest, we can’t really complain. The weather is fantastic, not too hot and not too cold. As I write this, we are anchored in Double Haven. It was a bit of a trek to get to this secluded anchorage, but the sea is absolutely calm here, completely unaffected by the monsoon. We are sitting on the deck, listening to the fish jumping and birds chirping and thoroughly enjoying ourselves. Yes, we are frustrated that we have still not managed to leave, but sailing in Hong Kong certainly is easing the pain.

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Strong Monsoon signal in force

Here we are still, boat finally ready but with winds that are rocking the boat already in our very sheltered marina. The Strong Monsoon signal is in force and it doesn’t look much better for the next 10 days. We were thinking of at least venturing out to Macau in the next couple of days, but found out that the Macau port authorities require five working days’ worth of a warning to do the paperwork, which kills that idea as Lil Sis has to be back in Hong Kong from Wednesday next week for a few days anyway (we were originally planning to fly her back from Taiwan, but as it happens, it looks like we won’t be going anywhere before that).

On a positive note, we are getting a lot of the “not so urgent” and “nice to do” action items ticked off from our list.

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Boat ready, but the weather…

What a busy week behind us! We have been running left, right and centre to collect the last pieces of equipment, spares, school supplies and medication. We’ve also done a lot of administrative work, finalised boat installations, checked the status of gear, programmed radio channels and so on. We are happy to say that the boat will be ready to go by Monday (13 days behind schedule, but that really isn’t too bad!).

However, now that our attention has turned to the weather for real, we are starting to realise (or perhaps the right word is “admit”) that we may have to wait a while still before proceeding eastwards. We always knew that it would not be easy to find a suitable weather window in March, with the northeast monsoon still in full force. Nevertheless, we were hoping for one to appear (surely there had to be some beginner’s luck for us?!). For a little while, it looked like there might actually be a window early this coming week, but it has narrowed down and were we to leave, we would be pushing straight into 25-knot winds after 1-2 days. Not to mention the waves and swell from different directions that the area is known for, which in the words of a far more experienced sailor result in a “washing machine” effect during the NE monsoon. We just don’t want that sort of a first leg on our journey; there would be a real risk that everyone would run off the boat when we reach Taiwan and never return!

So, while fine-tuning the boat and bemoaning the weather over a glass of wine (or a cup of cocoa in the case of the girls), we are considering other, temporary sailing grounds closer to home. Those may not take us where we ultimately want to go, but at least we would get out of our berth.

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Real-life chemistry (and biology) lesson

Big Sis and Lil Sis have had a fantastic time today carrying out research into the operation of our emergency powdered oxygen. Not only are they both now pros in using the oxygen set (hooray, Mr Finn and I will have great nurses at hand should we need them!), but Big Sis also now understands how the chemical reaction works to create oxygen and how oxygen helps if a person is in shock.