| "Tiger Balm" N46#60 - Gordon Millar
June 20, 2006
We are now 2 months and nearly 1200nm into our cruise on Tiger Balm
and so far so good. We set off from Hong Kong in late April and
arrived in Subic Bay in the Philippines exactly 77 hours later, having
made the close acquaintance of a solitary whale swimming on the surface,
some dolphins who seemed to really enjoy playing around the flopper
stoppers, and hundreds of flying fish!
Subic proved to be the first step up on the cruising learning curve, or
more precisely, it redefined cruising as, "fixing boats in exotic
places". To be honest Subic is not terribly exotic; however, it does
have a lot of available support without which our planned stay of 2 days
would have been extended much longer than the 19 days it took to finally
move on.
Tiger Balm is 7 years or so old, so I guess equipment failures were
inevitable - what we did not expect was the domestic appliances to start
playing up all at once. In the 3 months prior to sailing we had replaced
the washing machine, the Norcold 12v fridge/freezer in the forward
stateroom, and repaired the trash compactor; however, in Subic the new
washing machine refused to rinse or spin, and the galley Norcold fridge
freezer gave up completely. The fridge we replaced with is a domestic
appliance running off the inverter. It was trying to locate a drain
pump for the 2 month old washing machine that took us to the 14 day
point - we could have left then, but for the arrival of a
super-typhoon! In fact, had we not had the appliance problems, we would
have been 100nm south of Subic in Puerto Galera, and been faced with
riding out a direct hit from the typhoon at anchor - so I kind of like
the new fridge/repaired washing machine a lot.
Strangely enough it was, what I thought would be the major problem
discovered on arrival in Subic, which was repaired quickest. When I was
cleaning the boat after arrival I noticed some soot around the
ventilation grilles on the sides of the stack. Turned out the muffler
inside the stack had rusted through at the base - I only found out when
it was removed, that it had a drain bolt located at the base.......
Anyway a friend in Hong Kong suggested we contact Lyle Forno, a Subic
based specialist metal fabricator, and to my delight he turned up 2
hours after I phoned him, spent an evening and a morning removing the
old muffler, and 5 days later returned to the boat with a /stainless
steel/ replica he had built in his workshop all at a cost of under
US$800 - it fitted perfectly first time and is working beautifully - and
it too has a drain bolt, only I will use this one!
We left Subic and sailed to Maya Maya Yacht Club and Spa - a boutique
marina and resort - just South of Manila. We spent a very pleasant few
days on a mooring outside the marina, reading, swimming. Then it was off to
Puerto Galera (PG) at last.
There is quite an active expat community in PG so we were welcomed into
the PG Yacht Club, and took up a Club Mooring. The plan was (and still
is) to use PG as a base and cruise the Philippines. It was quite
difficult to set off again- friendly company in PG, inexpensive, good
food, and beautiful weather conspired to keep us moored longer than we
had planned. In fact Colette was concerned, as she seemed to meet
people in the Yacht Club who had come for 2 weeks, and were still there
many years later. Nonetheless we stuck to the plan and set off on our
first mini cruise. Next valuable lesson in cruising - if you have
researched and planned a trip - take other people's advice to change your
plan with caution. We were targeting a sail round the large island of
Oriental Mindoro stopping at various islands/resorts en-route. We were
nearly talked out of it by a well meaning "yachtie" who perhaps did not
appreciate the advantages of a power boat! Anyway we made the planned
sail, stopping at Maestro de Campo, Boracay, and San Jose, before
moving across to Coron and Sangat Islands, and finally El Rio y Mar
Resort in North Basuanga. We returned to after 15 days. The plan had
been to stop at APO reef on the journey from Busuanga to PG, but a large
ocean swell made that impossible so instead of a 5 hour trip we made 17
hour mini passage, and entered PG at night. This is definitely not for
the faint hearted as the GPS positions, and actual postions in the
Philippines can be different by quite a long way - but having been there
in daylight, and kayaked around the bay, and with a good radar picture
it was relatively straight forward. Perhaps the most stunning and
memorable incident on the 15 day trip was sailing through a dolphin
"feeding frenzy" just 10 miles North of Boracay. We came on it suddenly,
and in a matter of minutes were surrounded by literally hundreds of
dolphins and tuna jumping around the boat - at times we counted up to
11 dolphins swimming on the bow although the camera could only catch 7!
The good news is only routine maintenance for the entire 15 days -
although interestingly I noticed that 2 of the bolts holding the rocker
cover on the Lugger 668 have sheared off - I knelt on one of the bolt
heads when I was doing a routine oil check! Looks like they may have
been faulty, or over torqued. As I write this there is no oil leak and
we will replace them once I have the spares from Alaskan Diesel.
We left PG yesterday and are now back in Maya Maya Yacht Club, in the
Marina this time. We plan to leave the boat for about 4 or 5 weeks as we
have to return to Hong Kong, and the UK for personal business. My boat
insurance, does not allow the boat to be left unnattended in a typhoon
area unless in a Marina, which seems sensible to me, and at US$12/night
very affordable.
On our return to Tiger Balm we plan to spend a few days getting her
ready for sea again then back to PG before cruising Coron and Palawan in
the South West Philippines. We may winter in the Philippines or move
onto Kota Kinabalu for Christmas - the great thing is we have no time
table to meet, and there are no final or urgent destinations!
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