No Chagos for us – for now

I think we’ll have to wait until 2018 or later to visit a place that has been on the top of our list since we started planning our sailing adventure: the Chagos archipelago.

I saw the warning posted by a Facebook friend: “Piracy Still a Clear and Present Danger in Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean” http://www.noonsite.com/General/Piracy/piracy-still-a-clear-and-present-danger-in-gulf-of-aden-and-indian-ocean

We followed up with our friend, and he gave us a couple more web sites to check out. They are listed below.

We were given lots to think about by an email this same friend sent us. Here are some excerpts:

“I would rely on military sources in my planning of my route when sailing from Thailand to South Africa. After all the Indian Ocean is considered a war zone and the military cannot be expected to provide any assistance to pleasure vessels whatsoever.  The military mission is to protect commercial shipping period.  Insurance companies assess risk for their insurance of commercial vessels and have shaded the entire Indian Ocean as a listed area as you know. …
 
My known information on insurance assessment is that when Quest was pirated they were insured and were within the acceptable route limits of their insurance company (a Lloyds company affiliated with the Blue Water Rally). Once Quest was returned to the United States by the military the insurance company absolved themselves completely of any claims made against Quest because they claim that the vessel was pirated and therefore not insured immediately before, during or after the pirate attack.  There was and will be no payment for the damage to Quest or the murder of the crew onboard by the insurance company.
 
… [If] you transit a known pirate area (i.e. Maldives and Chagos) your insurance will not be valid if you are attacked by pirates.
 
… [If] I … wanted to safely get across the Indian Ocean I would take the World Arc route across the Indian Ocean
(http://www.worldcruising.com/WORLDARC2014/itinerary.aspx).  I would bypass the Maldives … and bypass Chagos (a known pirate area today) and head to Mauritius, Reunion and onto Richards Bay during the upcoming sailing season.  I would take the advice of UKMTO, EU NAVFOR, US Naval Forces, Spanish Navy and French Navy and get out of the Indian Ocean area as quickly, as directly and as safely as possible. …

While the number of attacks in the Indian Ocean has decreased significantly
this past crossing season the reasons are fairly clear:  1) There are more
naval vessels using deadly force against the pirates, 2) Most merchant
vessels now employ armed guards onboard and these x-military people shoot to kill, 3) The 2011 sailing season saw historically high levels of piracy so
even cutting those attack numbers in half results in higher than average
pirate attacks even this past 2012 season.

[Two] good websites for the latest pirate activity are:
http://www.shipping.nato.int/Pages/default.aspx
http://www.icc-ccs.org/piracy-reporting-centre/live-piracy-map "

[END OF EXCERPTS FROM EMAIL]

So after giving it more thought and weighing the risks, we have decided to alter our route. At this point in time, our plan is to head down the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, touch down at the island of Cocos Keeling, then cross over to Mauritius (with maybe a stop at Rodriguez). We have to get cracking on our plan and try to find others going this same way.

We were sooooo looking forward to a month in the Chagos – away from civilization, in the midst of nature about as untouched as it can get, and in fishing grounds that would keep us well fed for at least a month. But like I said – maybe we’ll go in 2018 or 2019 … we haven’t scratched it off our list yet.

Need a Maldives courtesy flag?

When we were still on our Thailand-Maldives-Chagos-Mauritius plan, we stopped at the flag store and bought a few courtesy flags. They were all out of the Chagos, but we bought, among a few others, the flag for the Maldives.

When we got back to CanKata, I integrated the new flags in alphabetical order with all the others we have, and I discovered that we already had a Maldives flag. So now we have two. And we don’t need either one now that we are on the Thailand-Sumatra-Cocos Keeling-Mauritius plan.

I think I need to segregate some of our flags into a “Places we probably won’t ever sail to” flag bin.  We had once thought that we would sail through the Red Sea and Mediterranean (hard to believe it is no longer possible), and bought flags in preparation.  Once upon a time, we thought we would need flags for:

Croatia
Egypt
Eritrea
Greece
Iran
Israel
Italy
Maldives (2!)
Malta
Morocco
Oman
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Turkey
Yemen

Our bin with “flags we will need” is much smaller now. But our adventures will be just as big. And now we can add an African safari or two to our list. A pretty good trade-off, I think.

A Quick Trip to Malaysia

Thailand law requires that we take our boat out of their country every six months – or, sometimes, once a year if the boat is in a marina (which CanKata was). So our time was up in November.

We left Phuket for Langkawi, Malaysia on November 5. We stopped at Phi Phi Le, Ko Rok Nok and Tarutao on our way there. These anchorages provided some spectacular views of the skies, and we even managed to sail some of the way (not always easy on this route).

 

View from Phi Phi Le

 

High on our "favourite" list: Ko Rok Nok

View from Tarutao

The dark, early morning sky was amazing: Venus rising in the east, Pluto setting in the west, and Orion directly above us, with the brightest star Sirius close to Orion. The early night sky was pretty active: one night we counted seven satellites.

On November 8^th we arrived in Kuah, Langkawi – a safe but dirtied-water harbor – and immediately got to work buying a variety of boat parts and provisions that we can’t get in Thailand, like good powdered milk and affordable feta cheese. We met up with old friends (Tigger) and made some new ones (Emelia and Vamp) and enjoyed using the services of Surin, whose office is based right near the dinghy dock. She calls herself a “mini chandlery” and works hard to help you get what you need.

There's been lots of development near the dinghy dock in Kuah. Even Karaoke!

The chandlery didn't have much of what we needed.

The view from Kuah: a storm developing in the west at sunset.

We gave away the last of our books when in Kuah. Our shelves now have mostly reference books and cruising guides and duplicate flags of the Maldives. We both now have Kindle book readers and love them. They don’t smell musty, they don’t have little spider mites, and hundreds of books weigh next to nothing. The batteries last for days and days. Yes, we highly recommend them to our fellow sailors.

On November 20^th, with all the stuff we needed safely stowed away and all our books with new homes, we started our journey back to Thailand. “See you in 2018” was our farewell message to Tigger and Emelia. We will probably meet up with Vamp again in Thailand.

The winds suggested that we take a different route home. That’s the beauty of the trip between Phuket and Langkawi – lots of islands to pick from, lots of variety for route planning. We stopped at Tarutao North, Ko Talibong, Ko Lanta Yai (where we relaxed an extra day), and at Monkey Beach, Phi Phi Don (where we played with a wee dolphin). Between Talibong and Lanta, we hardly motored at all. And the amazing thing about both going and coming: it didn’t rain enough to be a bother, but it rained enough to clean our canvas and allow us to catch some water for our tank. It tastes so much better than our reverse-osmosis water!

 

View from Talibong, after this system rained on us.

View from Talibong after the sun set a little lower.

 

View from Ko Lanta Yai

Another view from Ko Lanta Yai, a little later. See the green?

 

Another view from Ko Lanta the next night: a stark difference.

 

Darrel and the dolphin at Phi Phi Don

 

Loretta petting the dolphin at Phi Phi Don.

 

The morning sky over Phi Phi Don

CanKata heading home to Phuket

Sailing in clean water allows me another treat: doing laundry in salt water. It always gives me a thrill to practice water conservation. My super-duper $80 washer/spinner squeezes all the salt water out, and then all I need is one rinse in fresh, another good spin, a few hours hanging in the breeze and sun, and Voila – spring-smelling laundry with just a small tub of fresh water.

One small frustration we had on our journey was our inability to use our ham radio for emails – something that will be critical for us when we leave Thailand in February. We can’t figure out if the problem is related to software, hardware, or uncooperative air waves. We are still working on a resolution and MUST get this solved before we leave.

We had a visitor on board for most of our journey: a little gecko. We hardly saw it, but often saw a little piece of black and white poo which is the calling card of the gecko. We haven’t seen any evidence for a few days now, and wonder if it went ashore at Monkey Beach.  Too bad – we didn’t have one mosquito aboard while it was here.

So good-bye gecko, good-bye books, and good-bye Malaysia. “See you in 2018”, Langkawi, or maybe earlier if we need to change our route once again. One never knows for sure.

P.S. I am seeing regular updates on Facebook about our many Aussie sailing friends who are arriving home safely from S.E. Asia. Well done, mates!