Sailing from Langkawi to Ao Chalong in Phuket was our first experience sailing into Thailand waters and clearing customs and immigration at Ao Chalong. Once there, we had to get into our chores… i.e. find a supermarket, laundry, scooter hire, fuel and an engineer! But first we get to explore some of the beautiful Thai islands…
Clearing in and out of customs, pirates, transport, phone and internet, cheap food, shopping, fruit and veg, fuel, hardware, bartering, trading and gifts, as well as some basic Indonesian words to know are covered in this post. It also includes a link to a google map of the anchorages we used which includes information about the holding and the depth of water.
Surrounded by beautiful green islands; mountainous with sheer rock faces plunging into blue water, we had finally reached Langkawi and the surrounding islands. We anchored at Pulau Singa Besar for the night and, not realising what little gem was hidden beneath the trees, we moved on the next day for Kuah.
Pontianak… I promised you pirates! In this case we thankfully didn’t meet our pirates but the act of piracy that befell us went like this….
After a 24 hour, overnight sail, we arrived at Pontianak in a torrential downpour. Pontianak is about 10 mile up river and, once there, we anchored, had some dinner and fell promptly to sleep. We woke the next morning to find our newly acquired (and near new) motor had been stolen. The pirates had pinched our little putt putt and we were not happy! The day didn’t get any better…
We left for Indonesia, from Darwin, on Thursday 13th of November. The trip was uneventful and very pleasant. We thought we would have to motor-sail the entire way but fortunately we got a couple of really good sails in. We didn’t see another ship, or boat, once we left Darwin until we were about 25 miles from our destination, Pulau Leti. We arrived at Leti at 2330 and anchored in the dark. It was a little disconcerting heading to shore to find water shallow enough to anchor and the depth going from 1300 feet to 20 feet in a matter of seconds…