Phuket, Thailand …
The Annual (Almost Always Late) Holiday Letter 🙂
First off, where are we and how the heck did we get here? We’ll give you a hint: it’s 6,659.18 sailing miles from New Zealand and it’s hot…darn hot. If you have been staying up with our infrequent posts or if you pulled out your ocean charts, parallel rule and dividers and just plain got lucky you figured out we are somewhere in Thailand. They say the journey itself is half the fun in which case we must be having a ball. Since New Zealand Kailani has taken us to New Caledonia, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and now Thailand, and by air we managed a three week trip back to the US stopping in Hong Kong which since 1 July 1997 has been part of China. That is eight different countries although strictly speaking New Caledonia is a French territory. Our passports have nary a blank page.
We risk boring you to tears if we chronicle our travels in detail so herewith a few highlights:
Leaving New Zealand for the islands is always a crap shoot with the weather, and this year was no different. This was the second time we did the 1,000 nm trip as a family but to make it interesting (and to cut down on the watch duty time) we invited our friends Tom and Di along. The wind was on the beam at 25-30 kts virtually the whole way but Kailani is so fast that she dragged the wind forward so we spent four days essentially going to weather on our ear in a cross sea. Sophia was the only one who seemed nonplussed by the passage as she got to watch a movie every afternoon, a major break from home school. And Di, to her credit, battled through seasickness to the point that right after arriving in New Caledonia she and Tom flew back to New Zealand and bought a boat.
A little less than halfway between New Caledonia and the Queensland coast of Australia lies Chesterfield Reef. The charts all say it is part of Australia, the weather beaten signs on the small sand cays claim it as French territory but in reality it belongs to the thousands of nesting sea birds that make their home there. We saw only two other boats during the weeks we hung out there and pretty much had the place to ourselves. We hiked all the islands, got dive bombed by terns, frigates and boobys, found many much-coveted nautilus shells and shared the calm inner lagoon with a bunch of small reef sharks.
It is a long way from Townsville, Australia up through the islands of the Great Barrier Reef and then across the Arafura Sea to Darwin. Sophia saw her first circus in Townsville and has now listed circus performer as a likely career choice. (Animal protector, whatever that is, is a good possibility as well.) There was also a water park in Townsville where she spent a lot of afternoons oblivious to the fact the locals stayed away because it was winter. We had some of the best sailing wind on these 1,412 miles of coastal cruising but the heavy shipping traffic combined with frequent course changes to avoid the scattered islands inside the Reef created some stressful moments. We were actually following in the wake of Captain Cook so as stressful as it was for us we cannot even imagine what it must have been like for him to thread his way through these hazards with no charts and no engine.
Darwin hadn’t changed all that much since Jen and I were here the last time we sailed these waters in 2005 although the city now has a single sail maker and traffic cameras; we needed a bit of help from the former and got tagged for 3 clicks over the limit by the latter. We managed a side trip to Kakadu National Park to take in the wildlife and aboriginal rock art, but the main reason to go to Darwin was to hook up with the Sail Indonesia Rally, essentially 50 boats trying to push off the notorious Indonesian bureaucratic morass on to the rally organizers. We ran into some old friends and made some new ones in the fleet.
Once we hit Indonesia we essentially lost the wind. We managed a few hundred miles here and there under sail and occasionally, because we were not in any hurry, put up the Code 0 and drifted along at 2-3 kts, but in the main this was just one long drawn out motor.  We found the people to be nice, the food passable and inexpensive and the culture to be interesting. The country is primarily Muslim and the call to prayer was our constant companion during the three months we were there. Unfortunately with the exception of Komodo National Park the water was littered with plastic and the seas devoid of any real significant life. This does not stop the local fishermen from stringing their nets everywhere so that navigation, particularly at night, becomes a bob and weave just to go in a straight line. Be that as it may, it would be hard to imagine a harder working group of people than these fishermen. Often miles from land in the most precarious of craft they fish all night. They are very poor and are often able to show only the simplest of lights. On one of our night passages the only thing that kept us from running one down was a flicking Bic lighter.
As if a trash strewn ocean wasn’t depressing enough, much of the archipelago was on fire, with virtually all of the fires purposely set. The locals would burn the brush on the smaller islands, and they seemed to wait until we had dropped anchor to strike the match. The commercial logging companies and palm oil producers on Borneo were the worst culprits and the thick acrid smoke from these fires spread over 500 miles all the way to Singapore which is ironic since most of the logging and palm oil companies are Singaporean. At times we had a hard time seeing the bow of the boat.
We took a six day side trip to Bali, specifically the city of Ubud. We stayed in a delightful little hotel with only six rooms surrounded by a peaceful garden. Our hostess, Murni, has been in Ubud for so long that she lays claim to the oldest restaurant in town. We toured many temples throughout the area and Sophia and Jen went to the spa for a day. Sophia regards this as the highlight of the season. Although there are Muslim enclaves, the island of Bali is primarily Indo Hindu with a touch of Buddhism giving the island a unique identity in the archipelago.
The wildlife highlights of the past year have to be the orangutans of Borneo and the Komodo dragons of, you guessed it, Komodo.  We were fortunate to witness from less than 25 feet several of the latter tearing into a goat carcass. When a couple of them lost interest in the goat and started eying us we made a deliberate exit. The orangutan were suffering a bit from the aforementioned smoke but they provided quite a show as they ate their way through a pile of bananas on the feeding platforms in the jungle. Our guided trip into the orangutan sanctuary was aboard a klotok, a double decker wooden boat where we lived on the covered top deck and the three crew took great care of us for two days.
We cleared into Malaysia in early October and decided to take a quick trip back to the US to escape the smoke and heat. (The heat was so intense that a pair of my flip flops delaminated when I left them on the dock unattended over the lunch hour.) Upon our return we joined the Sail Malaysia Rally (the same 50 boats plus a few more) mostly for the swag (cool t-shirts, a flag, reduced marina fees and a couple of free dinners with beer) and made our way up the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. Along the way we managed a couple of land trips including a fabulous three days in Georgetown on Penang. The town is a complete mish mash of all the cultures of this part of the world. There was a huge Chinese influence throughout the history of the city and they are still a significant slice of the population. It was not uncommon to find Malays, Chinese, Indians and descendents of the English colonists working and living cheek by jowl. One of the great outgrowths of this cultural smorgasbord is incredible and varied cuisine. It was the first time we felt we were truly in SE Asia.
Off and on since Darwin we have been in the company of kid boats. Sophia has made quite a few friends among these cruising kids and managed to have her eighth birthday party here in Thailand with several invited guests that were not either over 40 or stuffed, a first for her since 2011. And once again Santa managed to find Kailani and squeeze through a dorade to leave Sophia something under our 18 inch tall Christmas tree. The Thais do up New Year’s Eve in a big way. Everybody in every bay along every beach launches fireworks, everything from little fizzlers to Sydney Harbour behemoths. The show went on and on for hours.
Finally, in the category of opening and closing doors, Constance T. Earl, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, great grandmother, horsewoman, commercial pilot and flight instructor, bridge master, dog lover, friend and so much more peacefully departed this mortal veil this past Christmas Eve. She is sorely missed. But as that door closed on a remarkable life, through an open door came Maxwell and Violet, the latest additions to the Earl family. While they will never know their great grandmother, they may take comfort in the fact that some of her runs through them. It will no doubt serve them well.
So that was our year. We’ll spare you the saga of the many repairs we have had to make, the exhaustion we suffered having to hand steer through a couple of days of rough seas without an autopilot, the absurdity of being rear ended by an unlicensed French lady when we were a half block from turning in our rental car and the irony of escaping the South Pacific cyclone season by sailing to New Zealand only to be hit by a cyclone in New Zealand. But this is our life, and regardless of its ups and downs, we experience it all as a family, and for that we consider ourselves to be the luckiest three people on the planet.
Have a safe, happy and rewarding 2016.
07 48 N 098 22 E
at anchor
Panwa Beach
Phuket, Thailand
