[WHISTLER LOGS]
November 2010
I love excitement but this was a bit much!!
You would not believe what happened 2 days ago. After 6 hours of motoring, I anchored to the west of an island for the night. I was traveling with 2 other boats, a Canadian boat and a Swiss boat. So I inflated my kayak and went for some exercise before sunset, stopping to chat with my friends on the other two boats. They offered me to climb aboard for some beers but I declined since that is what I had been doing pretty heavily for the last 10 days in Tioman. When I got back to the boat, I could hear the bilge alarm. I opened the door to the mechanical room to find a lot of water, which level was just a few inches below the engine. My heart did a couple of quick turns. A couple of questions came immediately into my mind besides the obvious one: I am going to sink? Why had the bilge pump not activated with the float switch and the most important and pressing question was where the water was coming from. I flipped the bilge pump into manual mode and to my relief it started pumping the water at a faster rate that I was coming in, which was pretty fast. In a situation like this if the pumping does not keep up with the water intake, it is a race to find the source and to plug it before it is too late. Fortunately, I now had some time to find the leak. I started opening floor board in the forward part of the boat to find the source of the leak but after a short while I could tell it was not coming from the front. So I opened the floor board above the drive shaft and there was the leak. The dripless seal on the drive shaft had come loose from its contact plate and water was gushing in. The 2 Allen screws holding the dripless disk onto the shaft must have come loose from the thousands of hours of motoring since I had last tightened them. I got my Allen keys out and a few minutes later they were tightened and water and water was staying outside the boat, which is a good thing.
I had been very lucky. Had I accepted the beer offer, Whistler would have most certainly sunk before I got back. Water was coming in very quick through that "dripless seal" (Dripless my ass, hehe!!)
After the emergency had passed, I set about changing the float switch with a new one I had in my spare locker. That took a while since it is located under the engine and is kind of hard to reach. I also lost a few gallons of body water since the engine room was hot as hell after so many hours motoring. After the job was finished, I was covered in grease, slime from the bilge as well as sweat. Not a pretty sight. A quick shower was in order as well as the earlier avoided beers to bring my adrenaline level back down.
Couple of lessons learned. Always check the Allen screws before and after leaving the boat for an extended period and at least every 6 months. Same with the bilge pump. I should have done so as soon as I got back. The float switch always sits in an inch or so of water since it is impossible for the bilge pump to completely evacuate the water.
I think I am also going to invest in installing a second bilge pump as back up Well that is it for your brother. I like adrenaline rushes but I can also do without especially since they can end in disaster. Maybe I should also buy insurance for this baby!! We’ll see!
Fortunately, the rest of the trip was uneventful and I finally reach Singapore safe and sound. There is so much I would like to tell you about Singapore, a city state and probably the greatest success story of the 20th century. Lee Kuan Yew, the Prime Minister for 30+ years, took this third world country of 4 million people to first world status in less than 3 decades. I read his autobiography and highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. In my view, every world leader should read his books and then go study under him and his administration. Talk about good governance. It is quite incredible!! Giant China even took notice of little old Singapore in the 80’s and every year since then, hundreds of Chinese mayors and bureaucrats come to Singapore to study their methods and laws.
After a week or so spent in Singapore, it was back to Peninsular Malaysia for the trip up the Malacca straight. Janik, my former Montreal crewmate who traveled with me a few years ago from Fiji to the Solomon’s, just happened to be in Bali, Indonesia and had 3 weeks left on her Asian vacation. 
So she flew to Johor Bahru, Malaysia and up the coast we went, stopping at Klang, Penang and finally reaching beautiful Langkawi, a Malaysian island close to the Thailand-Malaysian Border. For all the scary stories I had heard about the Malacca straight, it was quite an uneventful passage. We stuck to the coast, staying out of the cargo ship navigation lane and our only worry was dodging fishing nets and fishing boats. The Straight, less than 30 miles wide at its eastern entrance, for centuries has been one of the busiest shipping channels in the world with a large fraction of the world shipping passing through it. Less than a decade ago, piracy was still rampant, but now, thanks to Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean patrol boats, there is rarely any piracy act!