Sailing on yacht Watermelon to Sibu in Borneo.

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SIBU, BORNEO

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October, 1999
We made it to Sibu. We sailed in company with the Finns, so of course we have some interesting stories to tell.

The main river to Sibu is the Rajang, a very busy byway with lots of sawmills, so there are plenty of ships and logs to avoid. It's a long trip up the river to Sibu, so we chose to enter via the Paloh River, a lesser-traveled river which eventually connects up to the Rajang. Because it's not a main thoroughfare, there are no buoys after the entrance, though each turn of the channel is marked with a beacon, and in some cases, a range. For the first 5 miles or so up from the mouth of the river, the navigable channel is quite narrow, and is very close to shore, with a diagonal shift to the other side at each bend in the river. Later, the river was deep pretty much over its entire width, though for large ships, the navigable channel tended to still be on the outside edge of each bend. With a current that can be up to two or three knots against us, we made sure that we traveled with the tide, though determining that was not always so easy.

Our Finnish friends must have been a bit tired, or confused. After sailing all night from Kuching, they were about a mile ahead of us. We caught up with them and followed them as they were heading around a bend in the river; we immediately ran out of water. I said to Peter, "I don't think this is the right way!" He went below, checked our chart, and sure enough, it wasn't the right way - we had followed the Finns into a narrow feeder river. We tried calling them on the radio, but they apparently weren't listening, so we just turned around. Sure enough, they called us on the radio to ask why we had turned around. Peter told them he thought we were in the wrong river. They said they'd check their charts and let us know. We were sure that we were right, so we kept on going, back over the shallow bar that had given me such fits. Just as we were almost back into the main river, they called on the radio, "you're right, we're turning around." So we waited for them, to be sure they didn't get stuck on the way out again, though I don't know what we could have done had they gotten stuck.

It's about 40 miles on these tortuous river channels to Sibu, so we couldn't get there in one day, didn't even want to try doing it in two days, since we really could only motor on a rising tide - the current is too swift to want to waste fuel motoring against it. The Finns decided to anchor around noontime on the first day by just stopping in the middle of the narrow channel and letting down their anchor. Sven did make a concession to any traffic by setting a stern anchor, though. We didn't want to do that - navigation channels are nothing to mess with, so we headed out into the middle of the river until we had enough water that we wouldn't be aground at low tide, but not enough water that river traffic would be running along there; and there we set our hook. About 15 minutes later, our Finnish friends must have decided we had the right idea, because they upped their anchor and followed us out to the middle of the river. But again, they had some problems.

This was close to 24 hours since we had left the Kuching anchorage, and we were ready for a nap, so we went below. An hour or so later, a squall started up, so I got up to close the hatches and check our anchor since we were spinning around and around, the wind pushing us one way, the swift river current pushing us the other. I looked over to see how our Finnish friends were doing, and they were sailing merrily down river at a remarkable clip. Glad they realized they had dragged anchor, because they were headed straight for the sand bar. They motored back, put the anchor down, and we watched them drag back down the river. And we watched them pull up the anchor a third time, motor back up, and on past us. This time they called us to tell us that they were going to anchor in front of us (!), but not to worry, they were back to using all chain (?). Whoopee. Theirs is a heavy steel boat.

Sven built the boat himself - well, I think that a yard built the hull and he finished the interior, though I can't be sure. But it's a bit of a low-budget, low-tech boat. No refrigeration (so what, lots of boats don't have refrigeration), but also apparently minimal electrical capacity. He has oil lanterns that he sets in the cockpit, lighting it up sufficiently that passing boats can see him, if he chooses to keep it lit all night long, which he usually doesn't. And they never answer their VHF - they say it's because the speaker in the cockpit isn't working. Perhaps, but we hear our radio in the cockpit without the exterior speaker on.

Picky criticisms aside, Greta, his lady friend, is a pleasant person, and we'll put up with his eccentricities for the companionship of another boat, but we have no illusions that we will be able to count on him in an emergency. No matter, we're okay on our own, and it's probably better to not count on any outside help - keeps us alert.

They have their good points, of course. Second day up the river we anchored near a large longhouse settlement. There are actually nine longhouses in the settlement. Peter and I didn't really have the energy to go ashore, but Sven and Greta did, and called us a while later to tell us that we had been invited to come in at 8:00 in the evening for a gathering, so we got out and inflated our dinghy and went in. It was interesting. There are nine longhouses in this settlement, making it one of the largest we've seen so far. There were 34 doors in the longhouse that we visited. That's 34 "apartments". Not many men; in the evening gathering there were perhaps five men, the rest were women and children. Mostly old women, widowed. Most of the people leave the longhouse and go into Sibu to work, which is too far to commute, so they stay in the city during the week. There is a large sawmill just a mile or two down river, and they tell us that a lot of people work there. The first part of our visit they were attending to a longhouse meeting, which was a discussion of the upcoming parliamentary elections, being held in ten days' time. They were speaking their own dialect, so it was completely unintelligible to me. But how polite they were compared to an Ochs discussion. Somebody would talk, and there would be a silence of a few seconds, up to a minute, before somebody else started to talk - I kept wanting to jump in and say something, just to fill the silences. Not like in my family, where we are all stepping on each others' sentences!

Political discussion finished, we could then just visit. The old women brought out their instruments and played for us. I got up and danced. The children all got silly. As with children most places, they were a bit shy, but I had brought my digital camera, and the LCD display fascinated them. When I played back what I had recorded of the old ladies playing, they couldn't figure out that it was a recording, and they kept putting their hands in front of the lens to try to figure out what I was recording. It was quite funny.

Everybody in the longhouse has a TV. They dress like "normal" people. They are normal people. They just live in this huge communal setting.

Even though the longhouse concept restricts the design of the individual apartments, they are each uniquely different. The material used for the front wall of each apartment can be very different; there is usually a window overlooking the common verandah, though not always one that closes; and the ceiling of each section of the verandah is often different. So it's a patchwork-quilt style of building, with the structure the unifying element. It is a long, one-room wide unit, living room at the "front" (i.e., verandah end), the kitchen at the back, sleeping quarters in the middle. In this long house the kitchen is enclosed, even the wood-burning hearth, though in the Dayak Longhouse that we visited when we were in Kuching, the cooking facilities were outside the main structure, probably for fire-prevention purposes.

So see, modern man didn't invent apartment buildings.

From the Longhouse up to Sibu was about 16 miles, and I stopped counting the number of sawmills after about 20. Amazing. With all those sawmills, there are lots of logs and debris floating in the river, forcing us to stay alert.

We got into Sibu late in the afternoon, and anchoring was a guess, and I think we might have guessed wrong. It's a busy city, with ships and ferries everywhere; but a freighter and a barge were anchored on the other side of the river from the city, so we figured it was an accepted anchorage. We anchored behind the freighter, and now ships and tugs are passing on both sides of us, and we aren't sure if this was such a good idea after all. The freighter, of course, doesn't worry, he's as big, or bigger, than anything that might hit him; we, on the other hand, are a little plastic boat. But we really don't want to have to be too far away from a place to leave our dinghy, and trying to get across the entire river before we'd be run down by passing ships makes this a desirable spot, if we can maintain our nerve. But at the height of the current, we were being bumped by a log every five or ten minutes; a bit nervous-making!

Sibu is the second-largest city in Sarawak, and from what we have heard, the richest. From the river it looks quite modern and spiffy and new.

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