Where am I ? > Journals >February 2004 >
(NEDERLANDSTALIGE VERSIE BESCHIKBAAR)

February 2004

The RSYC is notorious for the large waves rolling from the ferry jetty into the marina every now and then, bouncing all boats around like dinghies. If you want to live close to the city it is, however, the only feasible alternative so we have to live with it. We stopped waking up at night after a few weeks, but you have to be diligent in packing stuff away to prevent it from flying through the saloon if she takes a roll.

Yesterday must have been really bad though. When we came back the television and dvd-player were lying on the floor and the microwave landed in the sink. Brilliant. Fortunately they passed this little test and were still working when putted back in position. The 90 dollar snubbers, intended to absorb the major shocks from the landlines, turned out pretty useless. After three months, we are down to three broken snubbers and four broken landlines. Better use double lines and keep checking them every so often.

For those of you who understand the basics of leverage, doing some work in the top of a 17 meter tall mast is pretty interesting when seeing the marina and its environment under rapidly changing angles. I’m not too scared of heights, but at this point I decided it was just better to concentrate on my own little world rather than enjoying the undoubtfully spectacular view. Damn ferries! Taxi drivers all over the world, regardless on land or water, are just selfish bastards. None of these guys seems to have heard of the rule to approach a marina slowly. At best, they point at that joker in the top of the mast to their passengers. Quite funny eh?

Talking about the top of the mast. We could see the VHF antenna dangling when we sailed from Hong Kong to Kota Kinabalu, but strangely enough, nobody had great appetite to go up to the mast to reattach the thing. While replacing the VHF radio (probably as old as the boat) itself was easy enough, the antenna came about as a different animal. The cable is still there, ok, but the plug came off together with the antenna. And this particular kind of plug makes it more interesting as it has to be soldered to the cable. I was never any good at soldering when being a kid, so trying my luck in the most uncomfortable place on the boat was somewhat unappealing. John was quite confident he could do it and seemed to be in for a little challenge – a beer would do to get him up in that stick. Well, it’s all yours and my gratitude will be endless.

The list with goodies was to be completed with dive equipment. We already had two complete sets but as we always flew into our dive destinations, we never bothered to buy tanks and weight belts (no point of carrying 4 kg of lead in a suitcase…). Under the argument ‘backups for all vital equipment’ we got a third BCD and regulator. The latter can also be left dangling at 5 meters to serve as an emergency air supply should we suddenly run out of air. Cheapskates as we are, we of course went for used stuff which we found at a skilled, but totally unreliable Chinese trader (do they ever come honest?). He tried to rip us off and he probably did, but the stuff seemed well serviced. Just need to test and certify the tanks before taking these four little 200 bar bombs on board. No surprises please. The miniature dive-shop will be completed with a small 220 volts dive compressor so that we can fill up the tanks when diving in remote places. Which will be numerous times hopefully. That damn generator better keeps working!

[Stefan]