Lifelong Learning

Over my 70 years, I’ve learned many words.  Sometimes new words are added – lifelong learning! – but it’s not often anymore that I encounter a new word, one that I really didn’t know before, one that I have to look it up.  So I was grateful recently when Bill taught me a new word – but I had to learn it the hard way.

Kedging.  The verb, to kedge. Means to move a ship by hauling in a hawser attached to a kedge dropped at some distance.   Now, if that definition doesn’t give you an immediate aha moment, I get it.  It took me more than a minute to parse it, and I had the distinct advantage of having just learned by doing. 

After Belitung, we cruised to the Lingga islands – a group of long narrow islands, named after male genitalia, the Bahasa word lingga translates to phallus. And from there to the Riau islands. On our way to Batam, where we would check into a marina for a few days, catch up on laundry and other chores, and get through the cumbersome formalities of clearing out of Indonesia. 

First leg was a 48-hour passage to Penoh – a small remote fishing village near Kongka Besar (translation: big penis – seriously, not kidding) in the Lingga islands. Except for the mosque, Penoh village is built entirely on stilts out over the water.  Fascinating, to me, that an entire community would make their homes that way – out there, nestled in amongst more than 17,000 islands that make up Indonesia, not claiming even a few metres of dirt for themselves.  The mind boggles with all the usual questions – such as, how does real property law and title registration really work in Indonesia?

That first leg was interesting but relatively uneventful.  Sailing in the South China Sea for the first time – busy busy trade route – lots of freighter traffic coming from all directions.  The cargo ships own this space, and it’s our job to stay out of their way.  Not difficult, just more than we’d encountered before.  We tried to ride along the edge of the shipping lanes where we could easily yield to passing freighters but, at the same time, avoid encounters with unlit and poorly-marked long-line fishing nets.  

The whole enterprise puts me in mind of the plight of the North Atlantic Right Whale – the avoidance of ship strikes and fishing gear being critical to NARW’s survival as a species. Admittedly, a mere nuisance for us, by comparison.  But still I’m struck by and pleased for this sympatico moment with our underwater cousins.

Very close to the equator now, soon we’d cross into the northern hemisphere.  Our latitude was 00°59’S. We had calm seas, quiet winds and clear skies to start the crossing, all as predicted – so nice when that happens.  First night was full of stars – the Big Dipper made an impressive appearance on my second night watch. I was taken aback to see it there, upside down, ahead and slightly starboard, so huge in the sky, lying low, close to the watery horizon. It brought me a big smile – like bumping into an old friend in an unexpected place.

We’re passing through the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITC), the band of no-wind around the equator – also known to sailors as the doldrums, the dreaded doldrums, where we can languish for days waiting for wind to fill our sails.   Doesn’t bother us though, as we’re generally heading into the wind and, for most of our 2-day passage, we’re grateful for the beautiful calm conditions and unencumbered motoring.  

But the ITC is also an inherently turbulent zone.  It’s where the northeast and southwest trade winds converge, and the ITC can also bring both intense sunshine and heavy thunderstorms.  Even as we gaze at clear starry skies, we take note of almost-constant flash lightning on the western horizon.

On the last morning of the passage to Penoh, a storm blew in.  The wind shifted, picked up momentum, from almost 0 to 20 kts in no time, the seas got angry, and the sky dumped rain, intermittently ranging from buckets to drizzle.  But tropical storms rarely last much more than an hour.  A bit unpleasant, but neither long-lasting nor troublesome. We battened down the hatches, hunkered down inside the main cabin, and motored on through it, finally dropping anchor off Penoh village in still-squally conditions – gloomy, but safe and unscathed.   

More than the overnight rest we had planned, we sat tight there for a few days, watching our weather apps and patiently waiting for more settled conditions. On day 3, it looked all clear, and we set out shortly after sunrise.  A beautiful morning, motorsailing, picking our way through the Linggas, just a short day-hop over to the southern tip of the Riau group. 

Around 10 am, we crossed the equator – uneventful though, too early in the day for us to crack open the “brown champagne”.  In this predominantly Muslim country, alcohol is hard to find – as for bubbly, we didn’t even try.  Instead, we set aside two bottles of Bintang beer for a ceremonial toast to Neptune at the equatorial divide.  But when the moment arrived, we opted for our usual modus operandi as a dry boat underway – saving the brown champagne for later – when we’d have even more to celebrate.

By 1 o’clock, we’d made our way around Pulau Kentar (translation: obvious island) and adjusted our course 50° to port. Heading northwest now, and the wind had swung northeast. Finally and unexpectedly, we were on a starboard tack with decent wind in our sails on a beam reach. We cut the engines, one of the very few times this year. Our next anchorage was just 15 nms away – making 7.7 kts, we would arrive well before 4 pm, in lots of daylight, and ahead of schedule.  Happy sailors!

But that little brush with bliss lasted almost exactly 30 minutes when another storm blew in – this time, it was a biggie.  Huge downpour, a deluge really.  Immediately sucked all the power out of the wind, as it often does.   With a heavy heart, we cranked the engines back up – motorsailing again, but mostly motoring, our boatspeed down to 6 kts.  Less happy now, but it’s OK, we’re still on track to arrive before sundown. 

We hunker down inside.  Visibility is poor due to the downpour – and it’s relentless, not your usual tropical storm that’s over in an hour.   Another 30 minutes later, and the wind is back up to 24 kts. Seas are getting ugly.  Then suddenly, the wind shifts 90° to northwest – it’s back on our nose and blowing hard. We pull in the sails, and our boatspeed plummets to less than 3 kts.  Just like that, our prospects changed in a meaningful way. Suddenly, we’re 5+ hours away from our destination and arriving in darkness.  Well, we don’t know that exactly – we still hope and expect it’s all going to blow out quickly.  But it doesn’t. 

Radar shows a storm system with a 4-mile radius, pretty normal.  But we can’t outrun it. It seems to follow us.  We remain in the middle of it for hours.

We poke along at 2.5 kts, bashing into the waves and wind, the rain not letting up.  The hours go by, dusk turns to darkness. We’re heading to an anchorage beside the southern tip of a long narrow island that provides protection from the north and the west. To the east, there’s another small uninhabited island that offers protection from that direction. We’ll be exposed to the south, but that’s OK – no wind from the south this time of year.  We need to drop the hook in a channel that runs between a sand bar to the west and a reef that runs along the shore of the small island to the east.  It’s not a wide channel, maybe 80 metres, but plenty of room for us – we’re just 7.3 metres in the beam.

As we enter the anchorage, in the dark, storm conditions continue to change – sadly, for the worse.  We don our “foulies” – foul weather gear, bib pants and sturdy jackets, mine brand new, a Christmas present from Bill. The sea-state thankfully softens as we get deeper into the anchorage.  But not the wind – the wind remains strong with stronger-yet gusts up to 28 kts, and it swings around more westerly.  And the rain. Although reduced to a drizzle as we approached, it’s back to a torrential downpour as we try to drop our anchor. 

In the darkness and the torrent, we have zero visibility – from the helm, I can’t see any evidence of the small island to the east – nevermind any sign of the sandbar or the reef.  We don’t dare bring our tablets with satellite imagery out in this downpour.  Tragically, our Navionics chart at the helm station is known to be unreliable in certain parts of Indonesia – ultimately, it proves to be “off” by about 50 metres in this particular channel. 

As usual, we’re entering the anchorage carefully and slowly, but maybe too slowly in retrospect. Turtlebones has a lot of windage, almost 2 metres of freeboard, and the gusty westerly pushes us hard to starboard – so much for our protection from the west – the long low island is no match for this wind. The storm is deafening. Thank goodness – thank you, Sarah – for our Team Talk headsets. With our mikes tucked well inside our foulies, Bill is calling steering instructions from the foredeck.  As we swing to starboard, I’m steering hard to port, but suddenly nothing is happening.  I’m using the throttles to steer, port and starboard, reverse and forward, cranking hard, but I can’t turn us around. Can’t get us back on track. What’s happening?  I don’t understand.  It’s so confusing.  Until I realize.  We’ve run aground – we’re on the reef! 

What a terrible helpless feeling.  We try many manoeuvres, but nothing we do releases Turtlebones from the reef.  The engines are ineffective, we have no propulsion, we’re just grinding on the reef. Bill checks the engine rooms and finds the port engine heaving up and down and sideways. The wind keeps pushing us hard, further onto the reef.  We kill the engines and retreat into the main cabin to re-group.

It’s wet inside from the driving rain, pounding on the portholes.  The main salon is soaked from the ordeal.  Bill speculates about losing one or both engines. About destroying the sail drives. Ruining the rudders.  He plays out an even scarier scenario – the one where the reef bites holes in our hulls and we lose Turtlebones altogether.  We huddle around the chart table in stunned silence. Watching our wind direction and wind speed – westerly, 20+ kts – relentless. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Neither of us cries or throws up. 

Compelled to do something, I tell Bill I’m getting the ditch bag, gathering what we need to abandon ship. I get a bemused look. No, he explains, we won’t need to ditch – a boat can’t sink when it’s already run aground. Duh. Righto. I do feel slightly silly.  But good. I feel good, much better. That’s when I understand, we’ll be fine. Even if Turtlebones takes a beating. We’ll be fine.

Can we drop the dinghy, tie on a line, tow Turtlebones off the reef?  Another bemused look. No, in that wind, we’d need ten dinghies like ours to budge Turtlebones off the reef.  We need the wind to slow down and change direction, that’s what we need. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Bill punctuates the silence now and then to yell at the wind. 

My Windy app says low tide was at 7:45 pm – we’d just missed it at 8 pm when we literally blew into the anchorage. High tide will be at 2:45 am.  So, our best intel says the tide is rising – steadily higher water over the next 7 hours.  Surely, that’s good news.  Slowly but surely, the rising tide will float us up off the reef, n’est-ce pas?

No, it’s not enough. More confounded than bemused this time. But no, not enough. The westerly wind was not letting up – kept pushing us further up onto the reef.  And the rising tide was just feeding the beast.  As the water slowly rises, lifting us up ever-so-slightly, the wind immediately takes advantage and bullies us further and further up onto the reef. Eventually we’ll be left high and dry when the tide finally recedes in the morning.  Oh dear, I’m sorry, but that is just embarrassing!

We sat watching our instruments tell us what we already knew.  We could feel it.  We could hear it.  The sickening sound of Turtlebones crunching and grinding on the reef.  We imagined the damage while checking for leaky hulls.  The wind remained strong and gusty, still from the west, still pushing on our stern, pushing us bow-first onto the reef.  All confirmed by the instruments.

We needed a way to defy the wind, to hold Turtlebones back off the reef in the rising tide, enough to let the tide roll in and lift us up for more than a moment, long enough to create a watery gap between our bottom and the reef.  And that’s when I learned from Bill about kedging.  He noodled it out, drawing on his 50+ years of sailing experience, and now we had a plan – a plan that involved kedging.

Step 1, setting the kedge. Bill would drop the dinghy and manoeuvre it around to the bow of the boat, tie it on under our trampoline, just below our anchor.  Slowly, we’d drop the anchor into the dinghy, followed by all of our anchor rode (chain and line), about 100 metres in total.  All of this done with great trepidation – we worried if our dinghy would even hold all that weight. Well, it does, and it did.

Bill then gingerly pulled himself along, in the dinghy with all that anchor and chain, under Turtlebones, over the reef, in-between our two hulls, crouching low, moving back from bow to stern.  From there, he started up the little 15HP dinghy motor, and slowly slowly backed up the dinghy – away from the stern of Turtlebones, westward, into the wind, away from the reef and into the channel, carefully letting out chain in measured lengths, and finally dropping the anchor into the channel.

Back at Turtlebones, we pulled in on the anchor chain, making it as taut as possible, tight enough to hold us in place and prevent further pushing onto the reef.  Setting the kedge. Successfully defying the wind. All done in the pitch blackness of night, in the drizzling rain.

Now, there was nothing to do but wait, wait on the still-rising tide. We decided to try for sleep – still in our foulies – and set an alarm for 2:30 am, just before high tide.  By then, if our anchor held as it should, we should have some lift off the reef.  And indeed we did!  We awoke to the great relief of relative quiet, no more crunching or grinding. 

Step 2, kedging, involved using the anchor windlass to pull up about half the chain. Not enough to lift the anchor itself which held securely in the channel. We had a good bite on the sandy bottom.  The anchor stayed put but, by hauling on the chain, we slowly moved Turtlebones off and away from the reef, and into the middle of the channel. Success! Kedging success!

From inside, we checked for holes and leaks and found nothing of concern.  Of course, we won’t know for sure until we haul out in late-April and take a good look.  Most definitely, we’ll need cosmetic repairs. But honestly, don’t we all?  Turtlebones held her own and survived a most unpleasant ordeal.  A huge relief to know that we’re well afloat with no serious damage done.

After a little more sleep – better sleep this time! – we rose to further re-position Turtlebones.  We hauled anchor – in a normal way, as if we’d never run aground last night – and we motored just 100 metres south, to a better spot in the anchorage.  The engines felt unresponsive to me, and the jury is still out on how much damage we may have done to the engines, saildrives, rudders, and daggerboards – all the appendages that protrude below the hulls.  We’d check it all out, but not today.

We celebrated our good fortune – and a belated toast to Neptune – by going ashore to the floating Chinese-owned warung where we dug into a seriously delectable lunch of steamed hot ‘n sour grouper with rice and ice cold beer, a rare treat in these parts. Could not’ve been fresher, the fish was pulled out live from the fish pen.   Consulting the menu involved a video call with the owners’ son – he spoke just a little English, but a lot more than our hosts, and much better than our Bahasa.

Some social interaction with local tourists involved no words at all, no google translate, just gestures, body language, shrieks and smiles from their young children. They point excitedly at Turtlebones in the channel. From their perspective, entire lives lived on this remote Indonesian island, they’re giddy with wonder that we would sail there to their home, and from there to Singapore and Malaysia, just the two of us on our little sailboat.  Thrilled by our adventure, but blissfully unaware of the misadventure we’d endured last night. Me too, also with wonderment, I get to savour our adventure with fresh eyes – freshened by our ordeal and also by their perspective. 

Ultimately, I’m grateful for Bill’s seamanship – hard won after 50 years of sailing, of reading about sailing, dreaming about sailing, talking about sailing. I marvel at his calm consideration of our predicament, knowing our options, playing it all forward, cautiously mapping out our plan for success. I reflect how newbie sailors like me would have reacted – more precipitously, very differently, far less successfully. Many cruisers are just like Bill, lifelong learners of sailing. But it may surprise you that, in our travels, we’ve met cruisers – other sailboats circumnavigating the globe – whose entire crew is not much more experienced than me.

After another day of rest and reflection, it was time to take a look.  Bracing for what we might see, Bill donned his wetsuit. We set up the hookah – our compressor that allows for underwater breathing in shallow water.  It didn’t take long to inspect the various appendages.  More good news!  The saildrives and propellers suffered no visible damage.  Seems the rudders, the deepest appendage, bore the brunt of it. The lower leading edge of both rudders are chewed up badly, but nothing that will much affect performance and nothing that can’t be repaired.

Now, back to our new word, kedging.  Verb, to kedge.  Hawser means a thick towing rope or cable.  In this case, the hawser was our main anchor chain. A kedge (noun) is usually a small ancillary anchor, but we used our main anchor instead – needing, as we did, a stronger match for the nasty power of that westerly.   We moved Turtlebones by hauling in on our anchor chain, attached to our anchor, which Bill had earlier dropped in the channel.  Makes sense now.  But the definition skips out on why would you ever want to kedge, to what end?   Learning by doing provided that context in spades.  I feel like I get it now – how to kedge and why.  Lifelong learning!  Learning by doing!

A few years ago, we learned another new word from our dear friend, Dale Regan. Noun kedgeree, similar but entirely unrelated. Means curried rice with peas, smoked fish and boiled eggs.  Classic British-Indian fusion food – some may say, a British abomination of already-perfect Indian curry, but not me, I wouldn’t say that.  Coached by Dale and shared with him, we made a meal of kedgeree at home, featuring applewood-smoked haddock – smackingly delicious!  Not at all traumatic, nothing like our kedging experience, but a fond and durable memory all the same.