Our trip to Langkawi starts with good wind, which bring us past the island of Singapore. We “enjoy” the view with hundreds of cargo, tank and transport ships in front of the skyline of Singapore city. At least this time nobody disturbs our sailing and we don't seem to be in the way of a big ship. After over 60 nautical miles of great sailing, where we get quite a bit further north than planned, we anchor close to “Banana Island” Pulau Pisang.
Because there are so many fishing boats in this area and lots of fishing nets, buoys, plastic garbage in all shapes and sizes and much more flotsam, where we could get stuck, we only want to sail during the day. Most of the buoys are lit, but there are also those so called fish traps – a lot of long, big woodblocks sticking out of the water in the form of a V and a shelter at the end to catch the fish (see picture) – where your boat doesn't want to end up.
The weather seems to be great and we don't catch any rain or thunderstorm, although we can hear a lot of thunder and see lots of squall clouds in the area. In the meantime the deck gets cleaned as good as possible, only the inward facing part of the two hulls is still dirty. But in this area you don't want to go into the water. On our way down towards Singapore we saw millions of big white jellyfish with long tentacles and even now lots of them are floating in the water. They sting pretty bad and you don't want to fall into the water.
One day we are suddenly followed by lots of terns and don't really know why. Until we find out they're hunting small fishes behind our boat (see picture), obviously there must be a big school of fish swimming with us while we sail almost 8 knots!
One evening right after Port Dickson while taking a shower we can see three little heads coming out of the water for a few times. Probably Dugongs (Dugong dugon) although we cannot see the tail – we usually saw the tail at our other sightings – and they somehow looked a lot like seals. But this is not possible because there are no seals around Asia and the tropics - the water is too warm and the habitat is not right. So it must have been Dugongs, there is enough muddy bottom and seagrass at the estuaries.
It's really amazing how many fishing boats there are sieving the water and plowing up the sea floor in this area. So one can not be surprised at how rarely you see a fish at the surface and that the water looks very muddy. We think they mostly catch shrimps with their trawl nets.
Our adventures with the fishing boats never stop. Recently at 8 pm (already dark) we where almost run over by a fishing boat while at anchor. At the last moment we could lift our anchor and get away. They must have seen us, but maybe they thought they always trawl there, so we should go out of their way. Into the bargain we almost drove over a fishing net, which another fishing boat was trailing behind on the surface. At the last minute an emergency break, otherwise our electric engine pod would have been gone.
With good wind and no more fishing boat encounters we reached Penang on the 29.09. were we will stay for a few days.