OUTBOARD - Nov '99 
I suppose after all the stories about the Finns' mishaps and mistakes it's time to relate a Pockel pratfall.

The Finns left Sibu a day before we were ready. We had bought a new outboard motor, and had left our old one with the dealer to see if they could restore and repair it so that if we wanted to, we could sell it.

Our new dinghy is much lighter than our old one, as well as so much easier to inflate and put in the water. But its lighter weight means that our old 5 hp outboard wasn't really necessary to push the dinghy, and it weighed down the stern a bit more than we were comfortable with. So the new outboard is only a 3 hp - an expensive Yamaha 3 hp with a real throttle and forward and neutral gears. But the repair of the old outboard took longer than we had expected, and thus the Finns left without us.

We went in, picked up our old, repaired outboard and got it secured on the back of the boat. The following day, since we weren't going to leave Sibu until noon or thereabouts, Peter made one last morning run ashore for water (the rainy season isn't very rainy so we aren't catching as much water as we are using).

We almost never tow our dinghy. For just a day trip we will bring it up on deck. Overnight trips we deflate it and stow it. This was going to be lots of day trips with the possibility of visiting a longhouse on the way down the Igan River, and so we were just going to stow the dinghy, half deflated, on deck. First thing, of course, is to remove the outboard and bring it aboard. With such strong currents in the Borneo rivers, the dirty silty water, and with boats raising wakes all day long, I have insisted that Peter tie a line to the outboard before removing it from the dinghy and lifting it up onto the stern of the 'Melon. This day, however, we both forgot about tying the line onto the outboard.

You got it. Peter dropped the dinghy into the river, which has the color and apparent consistency of butterscotch pudding. Brand new outboard. Two days old.

The tide was falling, though the current wasn't running full bore yet. Peter told me to get into the dinghy to help, he put on mask and fins, grabbed a line and dove into the river. He made two dives, the second one he was down for quite some time, and when he surfaced he was in trouble. He gasped once and sank! A few seconds later he surfaced again, gasped, and sank again! I was frantically loosening the dinghy line to drift back far enough to grab him if he came up again. Well, it seemed like a long wait, but up he came again, and he was able to grab my hand. He got himself into the dinghy and just lay there gasping for air. His heart was pounding, so it didn't seem to be a heart attack, but he sure didn't look too good. He finally got enough of his breath back to reassure me that he was going to live, and to explain what had happened. Against all odds he found the outboard on the second dive and tried to swim with it back to the dinghy. The outboard was too heavy, the current too strong, and Peter was too stubborn to let go until it became clear that he was going to drown if he didn't. If only we had put a float on the line, or the line had been longer than the twelve-foot depth, he could have left the outboard on the bottom, swam to the dinghy, and then pulled it up. Instead, it was still on the bottom somewhere with the line tangled on it, and we were both too frightened to try that again.

Having come so close to losing him, I told Peter to forget it, let it go. He gave me that look and said, "of course I'm not going to let it go. We're just going to have to try something else."

The something else was a grappling hook that Peter threw out time after time, finally snagging the motor. But two fast ferries went by, raising a nasty wake, and the bouncing jostled the grapple loose. So back he went to tossing the grapple out, dragging it back to the boat, over and over again. Wonder of wonders, he snagged it again! This time we had a relatively calm stretch so he could dive down, tie another rope to the outboard, and bring it up. Gobbets of thick mud everywhere, but the outboard, after a lot of cleaning and spraying with WD40, and hours of attention, seems to be none the worse for its dunking. Peter's heart is back to normal, as is mine.

Lesson learned? Pay Attention.

Helpful hint. The air filter was full of mud residue. With all the twists and turns and tiny spaces, cleaning it wasn't going too well because I couldn't get anything into those spaces to scrub out the sticky mud. So I put some raw rice into it, squirted some dishwashing detergent in, some water, agitated all around, and dumped everything out and rinsed. The rice made a very effective gentle abrasive, getting into all the nooks and crannies that my hands and tools couldn't reach. This hint was originally from Heloise (syndicated column), so I can't take credit, but I think it's worth passing on since it works so well. 

DRUNK DRIVING! - Nov '99 

Kuching, Malaysia is a lovely place, but quite lonely. There are no houses along the mangrove swamp where we are anchored, and only one other cruising yacht, from Finland, is anchored here (we are possibly the only two cruising yachts in the entire state of Sarawak at the moment). 
A little after midnight a few nights ago Peter and I were awakened by yells of "help, help!" and "Mayday, Mayday". Peter ran up on deck and recognizing our Finnish neighbor Sven's voice calling for help, jumped in our dinghy. We padlock our dinghy to the boat at night and Peter worked frantically to unlock the dinghy while Sven is yelling "hurry, hurry, the boat is sinking!" "Greta, Greta!" (Greta is Sven's lady friend and crew. Sven and Greta are not their real names). Finally freeing the dinghy, Peter tossed the cable off losing our fancy combination padlock in the process, started our engine, and rushed off upriver into the moonless night, and disappeared. I heard him talking to Sven, then nothing. Ten minutes went by, which seemed like an hour. Another twenty minutes went by, and I started to get worried - where were they? I couldn't see anything, and they weren't answering my calls. I was really getting worried, especially since just then a large river boat, unlighted and hugging the shore to keep out of the worst of the current, came past the Watermelon from the direction that I had watched Peter and our dinghy disappear into. 

I finally heard the dinghy coming back. Peter had Sven and Greta in the dinghy, and he took them back to their boat. When he got back to the Watermelon he stunk of gasoline. This late-night crisis was launched when Sven and Greta came back to their boat in their inflatable dinghy after a long boozy evening in town. Just as Sven got out of the dinghy and onto their boat, one of the inflation valves on the dinghy popped out. The membrane between the two chambers in the dinghy had ruptured long ago, so with the valve out the entire dinghy started to deflate, and it floated away on the three-knot river current with Greta in it as it was sinking. Sven in his panic threw his second, fiberglass, dinghy into the water, and he jumped into it; but he forgot to put oars in the boat, and so he was also floating away on the rising tide. That's when he started yelling for help. When Peter got to Sven, the silly drunk stood up in his dinghy and fell into the water and turned the boat over. As he appeared none too stable, Peter figured Sven wasn't going to be much help, so he helped him back into the now water-filled dinghy, told him not to move and started alone up the river to look for Greta. She was okay. She had drifted a long way on the flooding tide, around the bend in the river, but she had had the presence of mind to catch hold of the mangrove shoots along the bank of the river. She then tied herself up and waited for help, in the form of Peter, to arrive. Peter got Greta into our dinghy, and because theirs was sinking, he put their outboard and dinghy oars into our dinghy while he towed theirs and went to look for Sven. The reason he stank of gasoline - their old outboard was in worse shape than ours and leaked gasoline all over our lovely new dinghy. The dunk in the river apparently didn't do much to sober him up; Sven still wasn't functioning too well and wouldn't, or couldn't, get into our dinghy. He wanted Peter to tow him in the fiberglass dinghy back to the boat. Well, our poor little decrepit 5 hp engine can barely drive three people against the three-knot current, let alone tow two dinghies, one of which was sinking and acting like a sea drogue, the other half-full of water with a drunken Finn aboard. As the current inexorably carried them further away from our boats as they argued, Peter and Greta finally convinced Sven to get into our dinghy and Peter tied their two dinghies to the mangroves, brought the people back to their boat, then turned around and went back to recover the dinghies. It was all over by 2 in the morning and we could try to go back to sleep while Greta and Sven loudly castigated each other, in Finnish, on their boat. After an hour of listening to them yell at each other, it's probably a good thing we have no neighbors, although when I was waiting for Peter to reappear out of that dark river, it would have been nice to have somebody to call on for help. 

Let this be a lesson to you. It just isn't safe to drink and drive.


PIRACY - Jan '01 

We have been sailing in S. E. Asia since 1997. One reason we haven’t gone further is that the people in Thailand and Malaysia are so nice, and it’s just so easy to spend lots of time here. The places we wouldn’t sail to, such as Vietnam, are easily available via 747. SE Asia is also considered the worst place for piracy. According to the Piracy Reporting Centre, operated by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), of the 294 actual or attempted attacks reported worldwide to the centre in the first nine months of this year (2000), 192 took place in five regions in Asia. Is this a concern for cruisers? In our opinion, not really. 88% of those piracy attacks were against commercial ships where the returns are huge, and fishing vessels. Yachts get plugged into the remaining 12% which encompasses all other unclassified coastal vessels. We have heard of no piracy attacks against any yachts here in SE Asia since we have been here, and we regularly listen to, and contribute to, the local Ham net.
This is not to say that attacks against private yachts do not exist. They do. But then, if you live in a house in Australia you are at risk of having masked bandits break in and terrorize and brutalize you. If you live in a city in the U.S., you are vulnerable to muggings, pickpockets, and other thieves. Yachts are moving targets and with a bit of care you will not be in a situation where you should worry. 
We tend to travel alone, or in company with only one other yacht, so we should be more vulnerable to thieves than the yachts who travel in packs. Yet we have had very little to complain about, and have never had our persons threatened. But sometimes a few precautions make all the difference. 

In 1987, while we were in Venezuela, an American cruiser had gone to the bank to get cash to pay, the next day, for a dinghy he had ordered. As he was riding on the bus back to the anchorage, he pulled out his wad of money (at the time, US$1.00 = 50 Vz Bolivares) and showed everybody what a huge wad $800.00 US was. That night armed thieves boarded his boat with the intent of stealing his money. He ran out into the cockpit waving his gun, which panicked the thieves who shot him dead. What were his mistakes? Lots. The biggest was waving such a huge amount of cash around – several YEARS income for many Venezuelans. We would never do that – we would make arrangements to pay for a purchase and bring the cash within an hour of withdrawing it from the bank. We would arrange with the bank to receive the cash out of sight of the general public (in poor countries, this is common and the banks have the procedures to do this). And we do not carry a gun to threaten or panic a thief. (see “thieves” in the dictionary) 

Right now there is a problem with Philippine Muslim terrorists on the East coast of Borneo, so we will avoid that area. We are probably not at risk, but it’s easier to avoid the area than to worry. Personally, we felt more at risk from thieves in the Caribbean than we have almost anywhere else in the world. But we have not sailed up the Red Sea, and we have not yet reached Africa where there is a lot of anecdotal reports of theft and occasional piracy. 

So our answer is that we do not consider piracy to be a major concern. 

Now for some stories... 

Back in the early 90’s Cruising World Magazine had an article on a yacht being lost to pirates. We were disturbed to read it, because the man who was lost was an acquaintance, had worked for many years for a friend of ours, and had started out cruising with us as we entered the Pacific. Due to delays on our part (there are ALWAYS delays on our part), he got about two years ahead of us across the Pacific, and so we finally lost radio contact with him. Imagine our dismay to read that he had been lost to pirates. But about a year later we mentioned the article to other South African friends, who told us that his demise was exaggerated. He was safely home in S. Africa and somewhat amused by the furor. What happened? He had reported on the radio that he was surrounded by boats that looked suspicious, then he lost radio contact. Apparently this was interpreted by the author of the article as a pirate attack, and since they were going in a different direction, they just never ran into the boat again. Not until we arrived in that part of the world did another interpretation of his radio contact present itself. While sailing at night in the same area of the South China Sea, we too were approached by several boats, and we were getting quite annoyed by their close approach to WATERMELON. They would often change course to drive close by us, then continue on their way. This happened again and again during the night. When we related our experiences to some Malay friends, we were told that the fishermen are very superstitious. If they are having a bad night they attribute it to evil spirits inhabiting their boat. So they have to find another boat that they can pass the evil spirits to. A sailboat is a prime target for these evil spirits, and so they pass very close to us hoping that the spirits will find our boat a more desirable home. 

And a nasty story. We were late (as usual) leaving Australia to sail to Papua New Guinea, and friends were waiting for us in PNG. Knowing that we had a couple days to go before we reached them, they decided to check out a different anchorage on the coast of PNG. That night, in the anchorage (which, unknown to them was considered a risky anchorage for private yachts), they were boarded by three men wielding machetes, and were robbed. These were people in their late 60s, and this experience terrified them (it would have terrified me, as well). They left the anchorage immediately, and waited for us to arrive, though they were ready to abandon PNG entirely. We convinced them to continue cruising the Louisiades with us, and we had a wonderful, wonderful time. We met many delightful locals, and never felt at risk. We were away from the mainland and its “rascal” problem. Makes all the difference. 

What could they have done? Well, their experience made me insist upon a passive burglar alarm for our boat. It consists of a pressure pad that will set off an automobile burglar alarm – loud horn, with a switch so that it sounds for about 60 seconds and then stops, to sound again if there is still weight on the pressure pad. Also has a panic button. (Peter is very ingenious about electrical devices, provided I nag him sufficiently – he feels no threat from anybody or anything). Most thieves do not like noise that draws attention to them and will run. Alas, we get very lazy, rarely use it because we just don’t find many places where we feel threatened. 

What we do not do is carry a gun. 

Here are two web sites: http://www.specialopsassociates.com and http://www.maritimesecurity.com 

I got the 1999 piracy report from them.