It wasn't exactly Scappare's maiden voyage when we took her from Singapore to Kota Kinabalu - she
has seen quite a bit more in her 30+ years that took her rom the US
West coast through the Pacific islands to Singapore. But it was our maiden voyage with her, and it was fantastic.
We took off from Singapore around 11 am after spending a weekend
preparing her, stocking up on food and diesel. Good thing the brand
new life fell into the water when we were still moored in Pungol....we
recovered it and mounted it slightly better...After port clearance we
were off through heavy container ship traffic and passed the Anambas Islands (part of the Riau Islands) at night, three of us exhausted from sea sickness and taking turns at
the helm.
We left Bunguran Island starboard - having sailed through the Riau
Islands - we later learned that this is pirate territory...
After that we didn's see land for a while! take a look at the GPS track log! The incident that made us deviate from the original path south was a
encounter at midnight: A rather large ship, lit like a christmas tree,
called us on VHF and directed their spotlight at us: "This is
Tecnic Nirvana calling the vessel on course 156 degrees doing 5.6
knots" - oops? Thats us...."Alter your course 20 degrees to
starboard!" - Sure, why argue with this guy. - "I am doing
seismic research and have a 9 km tow" - OK, now thats a good
reason...not messing around with him, I guess...
So we did alter our course, as you can see, and tried to look out for
whatever he was towing. Spotted something far away at the
horizon...and aimed for it. Well, it was an oil rig as big as
Spaceship Enterprise. The tow was nowwhere to be seen and calling
Technik Nirvana again wasn't much help: The new shift had now idea who
we were and what we wanted.
What else happened in 7 days: The engine overheated and we had to
switch it off. Found a leaking cooling hose at 2 am in the morning,
and: replaced it! This boat has every spare part you can think of!
A bit closer to KK, we changed the primary andsecondary fuel filter,
because the engine wouldn't start again. Learned a lot.
Getting to KK was exciting: Looking at the skyline of KK, a peacful
and nice evening with half the crew on the foredeck with a drink we
were caught by a really heavy and mean thunderstorm with horizontal
rain and heavy gusts. The skyline disappeared and including the
outlying islands we were about to pass. Sticking to the GPS track we
hoped the engine wouldn's stop and motored into Sutera Harbor at 1am.
Good for us, because the marina manager told us the next morning, that
had we arrived during office hours we would have had to anchor out in
the bay - no space inside.
