Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Arrived in Malaysia

We arrived at Puteri Marina in Malaysia after simply crossing the Johor Strait from Singapore, a short 7 miles ride. We stopped here simply to clear in the country and to refuel before attacking the Strait of Malacca as the fuel is much cheaper in Malaysia than Singapore; $0.83/liter instead of $1.09/liter. Our plan is to day hop from here to Langkawi, Malaysia through the Strait of Malacca, which is well known for two things; pirates and no wind. The good news about pirates is that this was mainly an issues in the 80’s or beginning of the 90’s and involved mainly large cargo ships for which large ransoms were demanded. Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia joined together and seem to have cleaned the area so we are not too worried about that. Anyway after all boat expenses we had in Australia and Singapore we could maybe pay them $3.96 for our lives since this is about what we have left in our pockets. Oh wait, even better we will give them the boat so they will become totally broke after a few months of trying to keep it in working order! As for the wind, as far as we know, the authorities have not done anything about that ;-) so we will have to motor our way up toward Thailand but since fuel is relatively cheap in the area it is no biggy.