Adventures in Malaysia

After eight years of sailing and roaming the high seas you wonder if you are still entitled to call this life adventurous. I guess we may after Julie having a serious accident on a remote island with no medical facilities to speak of, after a broken bearing of our rudder that started leaking and repairing it myself while learning how to do it, after struggling with Chinese red tape to get a visum.

You learn, often make a choice after evaluation between two evils and try to make the best of it. And in hindsight you wonder how local people manage with the primitive means at their disposal and admire their perseverance.

To start: do not get an accident on the Tioman islands! Julie had a big gash on her inner thigh that immediately got our full attention. One mm further and her main artery in her leg would have been severed and, as we later learned, the 'clinic' on the island would certainly not have been able to save her life. Now we were happy that someone calling himself a doctor injected her leg with three bottles of anaesthetic and put 20 stitches in her leg that looked like my granddaughter was doing her first sewing effort. At the time we did not care too much that he tried to work sterile but every now and then placed the needle and other tools on non-sterile surfaces in the process. Two weeks later Julie had a nasty infection there that had to be treated in Singapore.

We dared not travel on public transport with all the dirt to have Julie's wrist x-rayed, which could not be done on the clinic. Neither could they put on a cast. So Julie fabricated a hobby cast form a plastic ruler and some bandage, much to the amusement of the emergency department later in Singapore. They found two fractures in her wrist and put on a nice plastic cast. In the end a torn muscle in Julies leg caused most long term problems. All seems to be going well now after 6 weeks and we hope to take off the cast in a week time before heading off on another adventure in China.

Medical treatment a la Tioman...

Four weeks after medical treatment in Singapore.

It can always be worse. This man had two disabled legs but managed very well on his moped.

Adventure no. two: I had seen that our rudder bearing was leaking, so the normal treatment of that was tightening the seal a bit. Only this time the leakage only seemed to get worse. So after careful inspection we found that the water came in through a tiny crack in the polyesters in which the bearing was set into the hull of Stamper. No immediate danger of sinking but still a difficult spot under the waterline (so water coming in under pressure) and an area that is under constant dynamic strain from the rudder movement. The area is well known for Najad owners of some age, as after years of faithful service the polyester there seems to wear down from constant dynamic forces that in the end crack the material. The only way to repair is; dig out the whole bearing (4 inches deep), try to reuse the existing bearing ( a new one from Najad takes 6 months delivery and other types of bearings do not fit in the tight space).

I had asked the professionals here in Pangkor marina if they would help me with the epoxy work. Which they agreed to, but in the end they had other priorities at the crucial moment and they wished me good luck and assured me that I could do it myself. Which of course I did. Layering small amounts of epoxy to encase the bearing in a new bedding turned out to be delicate. A bit too much epoxy and the whole stuff gets too hot and nearly starts a fire, cracks all over and needs to be removed before you can start over again. The second learning point was to avoid at all costs to let epoxy come inside the bearing as it will stick to the rudder axis and it will be impossible to take the rudder out again. In the end we settled for making the rudder turn relatively easy again but did not try to push the rudder all out of the bearing. The effort alone already broke a part of the inner bearing lining. We now hope we did not damage the lining too much to have a disfunctioning rudder. The alternative is breaking the bearing, having to order a new one and start all over again. Better to see if the present construction will hold.

Our bedroom is temporary out of service....

While the bearing is being worked on. The lower bearing also has to come off.

This is a joke, the rudder is too heavy to lift. We use the car jack.

First phase succesful.

Redone rudder bearing, with about 10 layers of poured epoxy and 10 layers of glass inside. We used this specailly designed 'pully puller' to try and get the rudder out again. It failed and we keep the tool for if we ever need to redo all the work.

Adventure no. three: I knew about Indian red tape; world famous. But China, as a paranoid communist political system has some surprising features for us. Why do we need to apply for a visa and show our booked flight tickets if the Chinese government points out to us that they might refuse our visa? Why do we need to show on top of that an invitation form our hotel saying that the hotel will take full responsibility for our actions while in China? (the hotel readily gave us such a declaration adorned with a nice red stamp). And why can you only apply for a visum in the country of your residence? Julie certainly will not fly back to the UK for this and I just happen to have a residency here in Malaysia. They threaten not even to accept Julies visum request (a 5 page document including photo) but also require her to come back for an interview with some dude in the embassy like she is applying for a job. Every time that is a full day travel to Kuala Lumpur. If we are lucky we are allowed to collect our visa after four working days (again a day travel). It makes you wonder what the thinking is in the bureaucratic mind and how they may treat their own citizens if tourists who are most welcomed for their contribution to the Chinese economy are already treated like this. As the Dutch tax department slogan is: 'we can not make it nicer, only easier' the Chinese have an excellent website that spews out all the red tape if you fill in all xxx questions. In the end I had done the process 8 (!) times before we think we are ready to face the very helpful ladies that will guide us through the machinery of communist China.