11.1.11.11 – even better!

January 9th, 2011

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An even more promising departure date, don’t you think (see previous post)? Only 11.11.11.11 would be better, but early November is not a good time to start on this passage – the weather would not be suitable.

Our departure from Phuket to the Mediterranean has been delayed several times now. Interesting how these last minute problems (and misfortunes in general) happen in clusters.

We’ve had both medical and mechanical incidents.

First I got this inter vertebral disk injury; a terrific pain in the small of my back combined with severe electric-shock-like pain running down my leg, which lasted for maybe 10 days although I ate 2000mg of ibuprofen a day. Then I fell over on a slippery concrete dock (with a big bag of groceries in each hand) and hurt my elbow. A week later thick, yellow, sticky fluid started to drip from the wound. Some kind of cell fluid I guess, didn’t look like abscess. I decided to start an antibiotic cure to be on the safe side anyway. Next, I flew out of the dinghy in the surf at a beach and landed on my back on the hard sand (not the same side of the back as the previous back injury). Moving around is very painful, but I hope it’s only an impact on a muscle. Luckily the dingy and outboard didn’t submerge, as they did last year in the same spot.

A severe touch of lip herpes didn’t help making my mood much better.

One of our mechanical problems worth mentioning is the break down of the engine control. Again a prime example what corrosion between two dissimilar metals (aluminium and stainless as usual) can cause. What always amazes me, however, is how skillful machinists you can find almost everywhere. Pretty much anything can be fabricated in a machine shop with basic tools.

Look at the photos. To the left is the original lever (or what is left of it) of my Morse-control. To the right is the new piece a Chinese machinist made me in a couple of hours for €35! The photos below show a close-up of the stainless set-screw which broke the cast aluminium handle, and our temporary control-arrangement.
Click here for larger view of left photo.
Click here for larger view of right photo.

Back to the heading of this post: Our latest take-off date is now 11th of January 2011 at 11:00, the day after tomorrow.

Insha’Allah.

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1.1.11.11

January 1st, 2011

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No, the header is not data code, and Happy New Year to all.

As you may know cruisers tend to be superstitious. For instance, you never start on a voyage on a Friday. We have recently had some bad luck, so we thought it would be wise to choose a good departure date on our journey across the Bay of Bengal, The Arabian Sea, The Gulf of Yemen and the Red Sea, much of the route known today as Pirate Alley. We decided on 1.1.11.11, which of course is the code for 1st of January 2011 at 11am.

Unfortunately Murphy appears to be persistently aboard Scorpio lately. On New Years Eve our bilge pump broke down and as if that wasn’t enough, our primary navigation/communication computer started to have trouble with respect to conflicts between the com-ports of our chart program (running C-map) and our communication program (Airmail controlling SSB-radio via SCS Pactor 3 modem).

Therefore we didn’t succed with the 1.1.11.11, instead I spent 5 hours in the bilge this day installing a new bilge pump, that I had bought as a spare unit “just in case” (excellent planning, if I may say so myself). Problem was, that I had not been able to get an identical pump, here in Thailand, to the old one. This one had 3/4″ (19mm) hose connection ports instead of the 1″ (25″) ports on the old one, and all hoses around the bilge are 1″. For the best part of our nearly 20 years of sailing I have been carrying around an enormous amount of pieces of various hoses “just in case”, but during our recent refit I decided to free up some space and threw them all away. Bad planning!

Fortunately I had some step-up/step down hose connectors on board, but I desperately needed half a metre of 3/4″ hose to be able to connect the pump to the thinner side (3/4″) of the connectors. Just a few weeks ago I had replaced the hoses to our showers’ sump-tank pumps, which actually are 3/4″ in diameter. I decided to cannibalise on one of these (we have both manual and electric pumps in all locations anyway), but in the end I didn’t have to sacrifice the sump-tank pump. It turned out that I had used about half a metre too much hose on it and was therefore able to cut of just the piece I needed without compromising the sump-tank pump.


This is sailing

What about the computer problems? Well, I hope to get them sorted out on the way. Charts and communications are pretty important on the route we are taking during the next 3-4 months. There’s no help to be found on that track.

Anyway, we’ll try to set sail towards the Maldives again tomorrow, even though there’s little magic in the date. But it’s better than waiting until 2.2.22.22.

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What a Waste!

December 12th, 2010

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Using waste, Swedish city Kristianstad stops its fossil fuel use, according to NY Times. But not by substituting old technologies by solar or wind, instead it generates energy from a motley assortment of ingredients like potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines!

Having spent much of the past 18 years in the developing world and seen an enormous amount of garbage, I think that re-use of trash might be one of the most over looked strategies for a more environmentally sustainable change. Garbage recovery slows climate change, reduces the burden on landfill sites and saves raw material resources.

Unfortunately people in most developing countries show, in general, absolutely no interest in keeping their neighbourhoods clean and tidy. Trash is literally thrown out of the windows on one’s own back yards.

There has to be an incentive for recycling. When I was a kid in the 1950-60’s, paper recovery was an enormously popular hobby. We ran around the town collecting piles of used newspapers. Everybody participated, particularly kids and housewives. You got paid per kilo and when you had enough reward coupons you could claim your rewards. The English Meccano engineering toy kits were particularly popular among us boys, but there were much else on the price list, things like watches, dolls etc.


The Meccano. Image sources: eng-tips.com and waveneyvalleyblog.com

A Finnish ad for paper collecting

Image source: paperinkerays.fi

Why couldn’t a similar program be successful today, when some cities are almost drowning in litter? I doubt that even China has any national garbage recovery scheme, but I hope I’m wrong.

Plastic, bottles and metal cans are the most depressing items. In Finland I think almost 100% of cans and bottles (glass and plastic) are recycled. That’s because there is a relatively high deposit on these. Here in Phuket, Thailand, were people mostly drink bottled water, there must be millions of small plastic bottles consumed every year. They all end up in the dump, but worse, a large number is just thrown away on the streets and on the beaches.


Image source: swamplot.com

I guess landfills in the developed world are in general well run operations. However, landfills are the oldest form of organised rubbish disposal and a terrible waste (ha-ha) and should be decreased by waste reduction and particularly recycling. Problem with the developing world is that a large amount of the trash doesn’t even reach the dump and even the part that is brought there is not separated.


Image source: on.ec.gc.ca

In the Bay Islands of Honduras we saw trash being loaded onto a large barge, which was then towed about one cable length (less than 200 metres) from shore and all trash was dumped in the water above the pristine coral reefs – one of the best diving locations of the world. Bahia de Caraques, a town in Ecuador, calls itself the Eco City because it has two kinds of trash bins. They are of different colours, one yellow and one green. We were never able to find out what the rules were and we never saw anybody separate anything. However, we put our organic waste in the green and plastic, cans and bottles in the yellow – until we one day saw the pick up by the garbage truck: both bins were emptied in one heap on the platform.

I remember the father of one of my old friends, a wealthy man, whose hobby was to collect empty bottles in the parks of Helsinki. He always carried a plastic bag in his pocket in case he would come upon a thrown-away bottle anywhere. All the proceeds of this hobby he donated to his badminton club, and over the years the donation grew to a considerable amount. He could easily just have written a check, but the recycling aspect made the whole project more rewarding for him. (But I’m sure he wrote those checks also.)

Recycling is educational. When people have the incentive to participate they will gradually clean up their micro-environment and realize that is a win-win activity, helping to save the world. And I wonder how many boys were inspired to take up technical careers because of the Meccano set they earned by collecting paper for recycling?

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The Visa Run

November 27th, 2010

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Our 60-day visa was expiring in a few days.

Thailand makes it hard for people who wish to stay in the country for longer than just a few weeks. If you enter Thailand without a visa, you will receive a 30-day permit. You can get a visa in advance from Thai embassies and some consulates, in which case you get to stay 60 days (note: 30 days and 60 days, not one and two months).

Before your permit/visa expires you need to leave the country, then you turn around and return. That’s why it’s called a Visa Run. And there doesn’t appear to be any limits to how many times you can do this shuffle, so many people probably do it regularly, thousands of them every day of the year.

The Visa Run is a big business in Thailand. There are numerous organized Visa Run Tours by bus all over the country, every day. From Bangkok the tours are generally made to Cambodia and in Chiang Mai to Burma. Here in Phuket there are two main options, both by bus – a one-day tour via Ranong to Burma (1,700 Baht = 42€) and a two-day tour to Penang in Malaysia (4,000 Baht = 100€).

Some people fly privately to Penang, Kuala Lumpur or Singapore and return the same day. My plan was to drive our rental car the 300 km from Phuket to Ranong and then just cross the border, stay one night in Burma before returning. It’s supposed to be a scenic drive up there and one night would give us a chance to see at least a little bit of life on that side of the border.

Reliable information concerning the rules are difficult to obtain. If you ask in 5 places you will usually get 5 different answers to the same question. I had heard somewhere that, if you enter with a 60-day visa (which was our case), you can apply for a one month extension, but I couldn’t get this confirmed anywhere. One tour operator told me that you only get a 15-day permit when you return from Burma at Ranong, but in the marina office they said that it might be possible to get a 15-day extension, not more, at the immigration office in Phuket. The marina manager, however, recommended that I should indeed drive to Burma because that way I would definitely receive a 30-day permit. Go figure.

In the morning of the Monday we hade planned to drive to Ranong, I decided to try to get an extension in Phuket, after all. I asked the marina manager to write a letter to immigration supporting my application for a one-month extension of our visas. As the reason for the need of an extension I told them that our boat projects in the yard had been delayed because of much rain.

I presented the letter in the immigration office in downtown Phuket, and, the days of wonder are not over yet; only 30 minutes later I was sipping a beer, with a one-month extension stamped in my passport. It turned out, that with a 60-day visa, you always get one extension of one month (for 1,900 Baht) – no explanations required! At least it was the rule of this particular day.

But it would have been interesting to see Burma. Maybe we’ll go when this extension is consumed? Our plan is to sail away before that, but who knows?

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Our Seven Seas

November 23rd, 2010

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The expression “Seven Seas” is probably one of the best-known maritime idioms. But which are these 7 bodies of water really, and what is the origin of the phrase? According to Wikipedia, there are several definitions of the phrase Seven Seas, starting as far back as the Sumer civilization in Mesopotamia in 2,300 BC.

I think the expression Seven Seas demonstrates “all seas you have to cross to get far away, and return”, and will vary depending on the home port and the time in question. Therefore it will be different for, say, a 9th century Viking, on one hand, and a 12th century Polynesian on the other.

The number seven does not necessary indicate that there are as many (or as few) as 7 seas involved; this number has mysterious meanings, particularly in many religions. There are numerous tales and phrases built around the number seven: 7 Sins, 7 Wonders of the World, 7 Dwarfs, 7 Brothers (the name of a great Finnish novel by Alexis Kivi). Not to mention that according to the Bible, the world was created in six days and on the seventh, God rested. Those 7 days were the first week.

The Clipper Ship Tea Route from China to England was the longest trade route in the world. It took navigators through seven seas near the Dutch East Indies: the Banda Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Flores Sea, the Java Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Timor Sea. Therefore, if someone had sailed the Seven Seas it meant he had sailed to, and returned from, the other side of the world. (We actually sailed across all these seas last season).

In Medieval Arabian literature the Seven Seas also demonstrate the passage to China: the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Khambhat, the Bay of Bengal, the Strait of Malacca, the Singapore Strait, the Gulf of Thailand, and the South China Sea.

Consequently, fore me the Seven Seas are represented by, in chronological order: the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean.


Some modern geographical classification schemes count seven oceans in the world: The North Pacific Ocean, the South Pacific Ocean, the North Atlantic Ocean, the South Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean.

For us aboard Scorpio, on the last leg of our circumnavigation – and having already experienced Our Seven Seas, as indicated above – there will, unfortunately, remain an additional Eight Sea: the Pirate Sea, which (in modern times) is the area between India and the Red Sea, and even as far north as Egypt.

We trust that the number will remain safely at seven, with no pirates involved.

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Year of the Rat?

October 30th, 2010

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The Chinese think we are now in the Year of the Tiger. I think they may be wrong.

At least here in Phuket we feel it must be the year of the rat. Some of our Face Book friends may remember the scene I faced when I opened our storage locker after our return from Europe. Three rats were caught in my glue trap.

A few weeks later, with the yacht still on dry land in the yard subject to upgrading work, I found this rope, below, in our sail locker on board. It’s an unused sheet, chewed through in many places. Also one of the sail bags had a large hole. But the discoveries didn’t end here.

Sometimes when we leave the yacht for longer periods I have left the main sail (and mizzen) on the boom protected by the canvas cover, thinking that it actually is a better place in stead of folding the sail into a bag. We have never had any problems with that other than sometimes bees build nests inside. This time we were up for a big surprise. There were 3 large holes in the thick (8 oz) Dacron fabric, clearly the mark of rats.

So as a warning to fellow cruisers, I’m giving you a heads up for this potential problem. This sail was almost 19 years old, with 60.000nm of service, and I had been thinking of retiring it anyway, so it was not a big loss. But what if it would have been a brand new one? The price of the new sail is 3.500 USD.

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Living in the yards

October 27th, 2010

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We are presently in the Boat Lagoon hard standing area in Phuket, Thailand. Since we started our serious world cruising, in 1992, we have been hauling out Scorpio in 17 different shipyards or marinas – in almost as many countries. Only once have we visited the same yard twice (this was in Deltaville, Virginia, USA). Every time we have to go through the same process: evaluate the shipyard/marina, find the reliable contractors in various technical areas, hardware stores, marine chandlers etc. Everything is new, people as well as the culture. This is a complicated process but, at the end of the day, very rewarding: you really get to know places and cultures in a completely different way than tourists do.

We are definately no tourists in the usually accepted sense, trying to get our floating home maintained and improved and dealing with local small businesses. Just as an example, if you are in a yard at, say Costa del Sol, don’t buy your paint in the marina store, go to the hard ware store on the third street from the waterfront (where the local fishermen go).

There is usually also a lot of dealings with officialdom; customs, immigration, health inspections, agriculture, harbour masters etc. And usually you have to find these offices in different parts of the cities. Clearing in or out of a country may take a few days sometimes. Sometimes it is an additional challenge trying to explain why you want to leave your boat and fly home for a while (“you are not selling it here in our country are you, in that case you would have to pay tax for importing it, just to make sure we will want a bond while you are away”). And remember, the language barrier is often pretty high, they are not spelling it out as clearly as I’m doing here, and there are usually no written guide lines (as you would have arriving on a commercial jet).

But the bottom line is, that along the way we have met many wonderful people and even if we are getting poorer every time we haul out, we are so much richer with experiences – every time.

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Severe body piercing in Phuket

October 16th, 2010

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Click on photos for large versions

We got caught right in the middle of it all. No, it’s not the riots in Bangkok starting again. This is a scene today in the centre of Phuket during the annual Vegetarian festival.

The festival is a 150 year old tradition of refraining from eating meat, drinking alcoholic drinks, engaging in sex, quarreling, telling lies or killing. The procession walks trough the city and several persons pierce their tongues, cheeks, and other parts of the anatomy with sharp implements. Apparently they feel no pain, and show little sign of real injury, although we saw a lot of blood on their clothes.

Unfortunately I had a problem with my camera, so the photo of the man with both a sword and a garden scissor through his cheek is not sharp.

If you are not one of the faint-hearted, take a look at photos from last year’s festival in Session Magazine.

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Raising the water line

October 15th, 2010

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We haven’t posted any reports in the Log&Yarns -section for many months. This is because, since April, Scorpio has been up on the hard, where she is subject to, again, extensive maintenance and face-lifts. I will give a full report regarding all the work at a later stage, when all is finished.

This Blog-section is primarily intended for stuff unrelated to cruising, but it is convenient for short, ad hoc, writing about anything. So I thought I’d give you some ideas of what’s going on right now, here in Boat Lagoon, Phuket.


Click image for larger version

In the distorted photo above, I am trying to illustrate how the water line is being raised. This is the second time the line has been raised since the yacht left the Nautor yard in 1979. We have been carrying so much junk aboard, causing the yacht to float deeper than designed, that we decided a raise was necessary. In the picture, the new boot stripe (I think that is what the broad dark blue line is called) has already been painted. The thin blue line is masking tape showing the level of new anti fouling paint. The sanded greenish area is the old anti fouling area. The new water line will be about two inches higher that before.

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Seven more albums

September 8th, 2010

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Unfortunately, ten choices wasn’t enough to cover all the essential albums of my teen years. I feel a need to mention the most important ones that are missing, there’s seven of them.

11. Chuck Berry

Berry was among the first musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is included in several Rolling Stone Magazine’s “Greatest of All Time” lists, including being ranked fifth on their 2004 list of the Greatest Artists of All Time. Leaving Berry unmentioned in the Top Ten doesn’t mean that he isn’t present there actually. Practically every artist mentioned in my list recorded songs by Chuck Berry and all of them definitely played his songs on stage at some point in their career.

I owned several of Berry’s vinyl albums in the 60’s, but today the best buy would be a greatest hits compilation called The Great Twenty-eight. It contains 28 of his greatest songs from 1955 to 1965.

12. Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)

BB gained popularity for their close vocal harmonies and lyrics reflecting a Southern California youth culture of cars, surfing, and romance. Brian Wilson’s growing creative ambitions later transformed them into a more artistically innovative group that earned critical praise. Their 1967 album Pet Sounds has often been regarded as the best album of the 20th century (in close competition with Sgt. Pepper, of course) and Good Vibrations has been voted best song many times.

For me, however, the record that finally convinced me was their 9th album, Summer Days, which was released in 1966, the year before Pet Sounds. My favorite song on this album is “California Girls”. Today, I think the best collection of Beach Boys songs is the album “20 Golden Greats”, which was the second biggest selling album in 1976. When BB gave a concert in Helsinki in 1966, I had a seat in the front row.

13. Strange Days – The Doors

As noted before, there is a connection between the groups Love and Doors, apart from both coming from Los Angeles. Arthur Lee tipped the bosses of his record label, Elektra, about The Doors, then playing as the house band at the famous Whisky a Go Go. The rest is history. Their greatest song “Light My Fire” is on their first album, but I liked the songs on their second album, Strange Days, better as a whole. Some of the songs on Strange Days were written in 1965-1966 , but did not make it onto their debut album, such as “Moonlight Drive” (which probably is the first song Jim Morrison wrote).

14. Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul

Black music was very much part of the rock scene in the sixties. The dominant label was Tamla Motown, with names such as The Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, The Supremes. But there were many others; my favorite being the “King of Soul”, Otis Redding and I still have his 1965 vinyl album “Otis Blue” in my book shelve. A close contender is James Brown, the “King of Funk”, but he was more limited. Otis Redding’s greatest song, “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”, was released after his death (only 26 years old, in one of those many plane crashes).

15. Orbisongs – Roy Orbison

“The Caruso of Rock”, Orbison had maybe the most distinctive voice of the rock scene. He was known for complex compositions and dark emotional ballads. His greatest success came in the early to mid sixties, when 22 of his songs (according to Wikipedia) landed on the US Billboard Top Forty, including “Only the Lonely”, “Crying”, “In Dreams”, and “Oh, Pretty Woman. In a 68-week period in 1963-64, Roy Orbison was the only American artist to have a number-one single in Britain. He did it twice, with “It’s Over” and “Oh, Pretty Woman”. It is a bit difficult to name my favorite Orbison album of the period, but I chose “Orbisongs”, the one that includes “Pretty Woman”.

16. Are You Experienced – Jimmy Hendrix

In the winter of 1968 I saw Jimmy Henrix Experience live in Helsinki. I still think that’s the greates concert I have ever experienced. His first album does not include his best songs of the time, unfortunately, but a new release in 1997 fixed that problem, adding “Hey Joe”, “The Wind Cries Mary” and “Purple Haze” and some other tracks to the original eleven.

17. Led Zeppelin II

Probably one of the most influential guitar albums of all times.

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