Sabang, Sumatra

After taking another unplanned trip back to Kuah in Langkawi, we had to give up on an abortive attempt to find a new iPad.  Sheila, our iPad, (we give a name to everything on the boat), started giving us some serious problems.  We use her for our navigation as the Navionics programme is just ever so easy to use and we 'lost' (literally) our chart plotter back in Jepara - that's another long story which remains an eternal mystery.  Suffice it to say, the loss of this means the loss of our radar and the electronic chart chip which could have been used in our second chart plotter.

Due to the fact that we are imminently to cross our last ocean where we will be negotiating some tricky areas, a reliable navigation system is somewhat of a must and dear Sheila kept losing her GPS capabilities rendering her a tad useless.  

We scoured the town of Kuah with its myriad of cell phone shops but an iPad was nowhere to be found!  The reason, we were told, everyone buys them online these days.  Damn, not good.  We have a back-up system using Open CPN with C-Maps charts on Paul's computer which is very good but Navionics has spoiled us rotten.  The iPad can run all day whereas the PC is extremely power hungry, not a good feature on a sailboat.  

Right now, and I'm crossing fingers and holding thumbs when I say this, she's behaving well and led us safely across the Straits of Malacca to Sabang on the northern tip of Sumatra where we now lie at anchor.  Sabang is holding a Marine Festival for the next few days and are expecting 25 yachts for the occasion which should prove to be great fun.  We have met up with our friends Janice and Mick from Zoa who we last spent time with up on the hard in Pangkor and originally met on the Indonesian rally three years ago.  We're also hoping to meet up with other boats planning to cross the Indian Ocean at the same time, surely we can't be the only ones!

Our trip across was relatively uneventful, a good thing if you think about it.  The wind did its usual trick by placing itself right on the nose the entire way.  We could have zig-zagged across but the Straits are a very busy route for huge tankers coming and going to Singapore and, at times, we felt 'sandwiched' in amongst them; a straight, unwavering line is the safer option.  This is where our new AIS system really came to the fore; what a wonderful invention this is!  We could tell, even from 20 miles away, which boats were on a collision course with us.  It gives us their name and details so we could call them up to ensure all goes smoothly.  We even had one Ethiopian captain call us in disbelief that we were sailing around the world in such a tiny thing!  The words "whoa" and "wow" constituted the majority of his conversation leaving me with the impression that he's not come across too many of us during his travels.

Now off to party!