Hi there everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. A little behind this week. I returned from Macedonia to a whole bunch of work with the house project and just had my little girl's five-year birthday. So I'm a little behind in recording and have some really fun ones set up but haven't been able to get them lined up with the time differences and everything. My next one is with Baptiste Lambert, who dominated in Macedonia and just did very well in the Europeans, was just finished. But he was first or second, I think, five out of seven days in Macedonia, which was pretty remarkable. So I talked to him after the comp, and I'm going to get him on the show to share all his secrets and all the things he's learned from the French team.
And he's, I believe, third in the world right now. So that should be a lot of fun one quick bit of housekeeping before we get into this story. I've got a whole bunch more Recaps hats in a lot of different colors. I'll have that up on the website in the next few days So you've been waiting for a different style a different version. Take a look at that That's about all I have I hope you're all having some fun with this summer Some huge flights went down the last couple weeks down over in Europe, and some big ones starting to happen here in the States, and it seems like a pretty good summer. But I've had to head down with building and enjoying doing these podcasts because that's about all the flying I'm getting these days. So this podcast is quite a bit different.
I'm going to tell you a story from my sailing days. The only thing it has to do with paragliding is that we were racing from Bali to Langkawi, and by we, I mean the boat and I. This is a solo story because we were trying to get to Bir in India to fly, but we had just done a big full season in Southeast Asia, starting in Palau and ending up down in Bali. Bali. And my crew, my chef, this guy named Bobby, who was from Bali, couldn't get, he had an expired passport and wouldn't be able to leave the country. And Jody, my partner at the time, had to go to Kuala Lumpur to get visas for us to go to India.
And my first mate, this gal Sunita, who we'd gotten out of a slave labor contract in Palau, it's a whole nother story. She was a fantastic little little girl from Nepal who we kind of saved, and she was terrific crew member for a whole bunch of months couldn't come, I can't remember why, but anyway, in the ninth hour I was without crew and had to solo, uh, discovery this catamaran, I catamaran, all right. I captained around the world from 2006 to kind of late 2011, and this kite surfing expedition that I used to be very involved, still involved with now, but don't run the boat anymore obviously, but this was our, uh, this was our vessel, and I had to take her up through the Java Sea and the Malacca Straits, the two busiest shipping lanes in the world, and had to do it solo.
So a lot of folks always say, "Gosh, the best ones, the bed best podcast are stories," and this is one. I had a lot of crazy things happen obviously out, out on the boat all those years and two times around the world, but this was one of the craziest. The story I wrote blogs about all of our adventures out there, this one was called "Hell Hath No Fury," and like I said, it doesn't have much to do with flying. I was a very keen pilot back then, just getting into it, pretty new, and, uh, trying to get to beer to get some hours and, and get off the ocean and, but first we had to get the boat from A to B, from Bali up to in Cali up in Malaysia, and it's about 1,500 miles across the two busiest shipping lanes on earth and some pretty heinous weather across the equator, which you always get across the doldrums, but in this particular part of the world it's really heinous because you get these crazy storms that come off Sumatra.
They're actually called Sumatras, so there's a little bit of background. I'm actually going to read you this story, and it's just something for some reason lately it's been on my mind, and I thought you all would enjoy it. So here we go, I'll, uh, I'll read "Hell Hath No Fury," and I know I've got quite a few friends who have been contemplating getting into sailing and going out at sea, so let this be a little warning, it's thankfully not all like this, but, uh, it can be, be like this. Here we go. After our last trip ended in Bali, I had 24 hours to fuel the boat, fix a half a dozen urgent mechanical issues, check out of the country, and find some crew. Sunita and Bobby were tied up in Bali, and Jody needed to be in Singapore to arrange travel visas.
I had no desire to sail 1,500 miles across the equator by myself through the busiest shipping route in the world. I begged and pleaded with everyone I knew, regardless of their experience, but no one could commit. As the day of departure wore on, reality, which I'd been trying to optimistically ignore, set in. I raced on my rented motorbike to the supermarket, rashly bought a bag full of fresh goods, some chocolate, lots of coffee, and a bottle of scotch. I've said it alone before, trust me, it's a necessity. I was spent. We'd just finished four back-to-back trips. Instead of sleeping all night, I pumped out an endless stream of emails as I hadn't had reliable internet in months. When I finally did relent to exhaustion, instead of sleeping, I fretted about the autopilot, which was on the glitch. Even a well-rested person could only hand steer a boat for a few hours before making time-consuming errors.
The autopilot would also keep me off the helm so I could attend to things like charts, sales, and food. The other device that had to work flawlessly was the radar. Once I got into the Java Sea, there would be an endless string of mammoth ships, cargo, freighters, tankers, etc. traveling at 25 knots going both directions. From the time a human eye can pick out a vessel on the horizon, traveling at that speed, you've got eight minutes before it can run you down. A guard alarm on the radar sings out if a target gets too close. With a well-rested crew, the radar is merely backup to a diligent watch. But for me, the radar was the first line of defense. It could not stay awake and sharp for ten days. Both the Java Sea and Malacca Straits are shallow and constricted by hundreds of islands, some of them no larger than an acre, and others like Java, Borneo, and Sumatra stretch hundreds of miles.
I had no choice but to run in the same waters the giants did. Thousands of fishing vessels further complicate matters. Java is the most populated island on Earth, many of whom get sustenance from a catch pull from the Java Sea. At night, lights from these vessels are so dense and bright they appear as populated cities instead of vast, expansive ocean. Even if you don't stray from the shipping lanes, it's easy to foul a prop with netting. If this happens while solo, the consequences could be dire. But none of this was yet on my mind. As I pulled anchor, I kept repeating to myself that everything was going to be fine. I ignored my body's plea for sleep and instead enjoyed the solace and beauty as the sun slipped behind the peaceful island of Bali, leaving a fiery crimson sky in our wake. As darkness set on that first night, Discovery and I found a rhythm.
I cranked up the tunes, took a nip of scotch, made some dinner, and eased back in the cockpit and thought to myself, this might not be too bad. By midnight, we'd cleared the Lombok Straits. This felt like a huge feat in itself. Now I could relax a bit as we had an ocean on both sides of the boat instead of land, and the currents, which can exceed seven knots in the straits, slowly ease their grip. The computer constantly provides updates on our estimated time of arrival, depending on our velocity made good. I've learned it's usually demoralizing to watch this ever-changing tease, but knowing we had to arrive in ten days for a scheduled haul-out for Discovery, I couldn't help but sing out as the hours and days diminished with our increased speed. One knot faster on this end equals a day and a half off the trip. I set the guard llama on the radar, my clock alarmed for 20 minutes, and fell fast asleep.
As bad as it sounds, the body eventually adapts to these fleeting moments of rest. The alarm never fails to make me jump, but it is a necessary component of the night. By daybreak, I actually felt well-rested. A nice southerly breeze was setting in, welcome relief as we'd burned precious fuel motoring all night. I lowered the mainsail, set the jib and gennaker, and set off downwind, wing-on-wing, heading north-northwest across the Java Sea. Discovery seemed to be sailing slower than usual, which I thought was due to the current, but the sailing directions for the area refuted this, claiming, if anything, a northerly trend in October. Could our hull be fouled so badly that it was slowing us down? If the wind eased, I'd have to dive below to investigate. I remember a little over the next 48 hours, other than a number of visits from dolphins and continually altering our course to give the growing numbers of boats a wide berth.
At night, regardless of the hour, I could count over a dozen vessels on the horizon, most of them weighing over 3,000 tons, Discovery's 25, churning at 20-plus knots. When the wind died on the third day, I developed a routine. By day, I tried to eat well, read a bit, and allowed myself a daily DVD by mounting the laptop at the nav station so I could maintain watch. I'd long given up any attempt at wearing clothes as the days were miserably hot and well. Why not? I have to act the part of mostly responsible captain year-round. I might as well try to enjoy this trip as much as I could. But any semblance of pleasure was about to end. Brooding skies replaced the gray stratus that had been our cover since departure. We were still 500 miles south of the equator, and it appeared the dreadful equatorial squalls were going to stalk our future.
The next morning, the first of many storms hit. Raindrops the size of golf balls came down in heaving sheets. Visibility dropped to less than 20 meters. I could barely make out the bow of the boat from the inside of the saloon. Before the squall, I'd counted two dozen ships at every point of the compass, and now I couldn't see a thing. The radar screen was solid snow, its echoes unable to penetrate the cascades of water. It was impossible to see other vessels, and just as impossible for them to see us. I felt like a blind man standing at the center of converging train tracks with locomotives coming from every direction. We had nowhere to run. Great cracks of lightning scorched the heavy air, followed immediately by explosions of thunder which rattled the boat. It was continuous, as if the sky was supercharged with billions of mountain-sized spark plugs, all firing at once.
I still vividly remember that first night with these storms; just my hair, I'd go out on deck—I actually had hair back then—and it would just stand up and be straight as an arrow. It must have looked like Einstein. There was so much, much electricity in the air. It was really quite, it kind of shook you up. In the first hour, I sat awed by the deluge, but as the time passed, my nerves began to unravel. By the end of the second hour, with no relent in the weather, I started to shake. I was soaked and naked, but the shaking wasn't due to cold. I kept sounding our fog horn, though I knew it was pointless. An oncoming vessel wouldn't hear it, and certainly in no time to slow down or change course. By the fourth hour, hour, I was well and truly scared shitless. I tried singing. I tried listening to music. I even tried scotch, but I couldn't calm down.
In all my years at sea, I'd never been so afraid, never felt so insignificant. I don't like counting on luck to keep from getting run down, but that's the only weapon I had. I stood on deck and cussed the blackened sky and shook my fist like a ranting child. I can't remember exactly, I'm coming off script here a bit, but I can't remember exactly, but this was ninth or 10th time across the equator at this point. And I'd been at sea for just about exactly 10 years, started in 99. This was 2009, so 10, 11 years. By nightfall, which was indistinguishable from the day the squall passed after nearly six hours of hell, but it was replaced by another of equal power of ferocity and another and another and and another.
On the morning of the sixth day, after battling for nearly 48 hours, I was jolted awake by silence. No torrents of rain, no cracks of thunder, only the steady hum of engines. I raised my battered head off the wet pillow and scanned the sky. It looked the same as it had, but the sea was dead still and the quiet was startling. I brewed a cup of coffee, which had long ago lost the ingredients to keep me awake, and sat on the stern in a complete trance, my limbs aching from raw nerves. I killed the engines and we slowed to a stop. For some time, I just stared at the horizon, resigned and no thought whatsoever. But the stillness was intolerable as the storms. My mind needed activity, something other than fear to keep it occupied. I grabbed my mask fins and a metal spatula and dove overboard in the middle of the straits and scraped the hole of critters that in some places were three inches thick.
Little wonder why we'd been so slow. The job took two and a half hours. I cleaned my hands, which were bleeding and stung from contact with the sharp barnacles, started the engines and carried on north two knots faster than before. A nasty staph infection had taken hold of my left leg and was growing into a small volcano, a sure indication of my physical exhaustion. I was falling apart. A note on the staph, again, going off script here. When we went through the Panama Canal in our first year with this boat in 2007, We did this big trip with all these pros and big media thing. We had 25 people on board, you know, usually we'd have six, and just got wicked run down. I was exhausted and beyond—I was always exhausted running this boat, but I was beyond exhausted.
And Jody and I started getting these really regular staff infections, which for her at times were life-threatening. She'd get them in her head and places that were, you know, just too, too close to the brain, and you had to be adamant about getting on really serious antibiotics. I would get them in my knees, my elbows, um, and they would take, I did antibiotics for the first year and then I just got wary of taking so many antibiotics. So when I'd get them, I just kind of let them run their course. So you go through this really pitched few days of fever, just being, you know, being really sick. And then eventually, you know, over two or three weeks go away. And And then I'd have a week or two a piece and then I'd get another one. But I've since found out that actually Bruce, who used to support me in the ex-alps first couple, he was a doctor and he was helpful through all of this because he was out on the boat quite a bit.
But it was just basically from pure exhaustion. Staph infections are what you get often in the hospital when you're really sick and they can be – they're nasty and they can be life-threatening. So I started getting a pretty bad staph infection on this trip. Back to the script here. On the morning of the seventh day, I realized we didn't have enough fuel. The days of motoring laden with barnacles had used up our reserves. We were only 40 miles out of Nangsa Point Marina. This is a marina on the Balinese side just across the straits from Singapore. You can see Singapore off in the distance. It's not very far. It's 20 miles. Where I wanted to stop for the night and refuel before heading into the Malacca Straits, but it might as well have been on the moon. I spotted a cargo ship at anchor near the south end of Bantam Island and motored slowly up to her stern.
Discovery seemed a toy, dwarfed by the rusting hulk.
Two dozen dirty men crowded around their aft deck and looked bemused a few stories down at me, haggard and emaciated, yelling for help. Using long ropes, their crew hoisted up two of my empty jerry cans and filled them with diesel, then lowered them back down, slinging fuel all over the deck. The fuel was filthy, too dirty to even get through the filter funnel into the tank, which caused me to spill over a gallon all over the teak decks. I painstakingly removed the gunk from the filter with my hands and slowly got a few gallons down the funnel, hopefully enough to get us into port. Discovery and I pulled into the swanky marina just across the channel from Singapore right after sunset. Jodi met me on the docks and we dissolved into a heated fight. She was frustrated with the lack of progress on the visas and I didn't have it in me to bear the news.
We ate dinner in silence and rented a room at the hotel. Not surprisingly, neither of us slept much. Jodi had to catch the Sunrise Ferry back to Singapore to catch a flight to Kuala Lumpur where she hoped to obtain the visas, and I had to get back to sea. By early afternoon, I had the boat fueled, cleaned up, and ready to go. Five minutes out of the marina, the port engine RPM gauge failed and the autopilot wouldn't work. I stopped the boat, jumped out into the engine room, tightened the fan belt, which cured the RPM gauge, changed the fuel filters, which just needed to be done, and did everything I could to fix the autopilot. Late in the afternoon, we were underway again, but the autopilot only operated at random intervals. The Malacca Straits look like an ocean-sized version of gridlock freeway traffic. I'd never seen a busier waterway. This was my first time through the Malacca Straits, and it's kind of impossible to even describe.
It's a long, narrow strait between Malaysia and Sumatra. It's very shallow on the sides, and it's just got this very narrow shipping lane that you have to stay in because right on the sides—and talks about this in the story—but I wanted to give you a little more backstory. There's the the fishermen set these bamboo fish traps, and they're just right on the edge of the shipping lane, so you can't, you know, being a we were we were shallow draft, we only pulled three and a half feet, so we could have easily just gone out of the shipping lanes, but you can't because you can't see them, they're not marked, and any lights on them, so you you have to kind of stay in the shipping lanes, and there's just huge ships going in and out of there constantly in both directions. So you really have to mind the rules of the road and it doesn't, I don't even talk about it in the story here, but I was constantly on the radio that night, just, you know, Hey, this is Stanley vessel discovery, you know, so-and-so off your port or off your starboard at this distance.
Are you sure you see me? Because we're on a collision course, it just... it required incredible diligence, and it's incredibly confusing because the the Malacca Straits are lighted really well with all the nav lights, but then you've got all these ships and it's a pretty, yeah, it's in some ways it's a pretty spooky place to go through. I've had other trips through that were not as bad as this one, but this one was... was by far the worst. Early in the evening, with the glow of Singapore fading off our starboard stern, while doing my best to make, make sense of an orgy of navigation lights, I suddenly saw a globe of fire swinging back and forth off our bow. I rubbed my eyes a few times thinking I was hallucinating, but the flame remained. It was someone in distress. Not for the first time in the last few days, I swore.
That's all I needed was to perform a rescue. Three Indonesian men operating a longboat filled with fuel drums had apparently lost their engine. It was harder to tell as we couldn't communicate, but it was simple enough to realize they needed help. I tossed them a thick mooring line, and tied it off our stern cleat and turned towards shore. An hour later, after threading through a minefield of boats, I found a tug willing to take the castaways to safety. I wished them well, kind of. I don't speak Indonesian, but in hurriedly carried on, thankful it hadn't taken too much precious time. The Malacca Straits are narrow and shallow and run northwest, southeast, 400 miles between Malaysia and Sumatra. The sailing directions warn of many dangers, but the three most stressed are weather systems known as Sumatras, violent squalls that generate off the Indonesian coast, the obvious shipping traffic, and the shallow depths at the edge of the shipping lanes, which I've told you about with the red with the nets
And radar can't pick up any of the nets either; they're invisible. A sidebar noted that more insurance claims caused by lightning strikes are filled in this part of the world than anywhere else. The lightning began far to our west at 2100 hours. For two hours, there wasn't a sound, just a the sky of mesmerizing streaks of crooked evil white lines. There were multiple strikes every second; it was as impressive as it was scary, and I hoped it would remain on the horizon, but by midnight it was clear we were not going to outrun the storm. For some reason, the slow advance the lightning caused me to think it was only going to be electrical, even though the menacing cloud line and all the telltale signs—a strong wind shear, flat bottom, massive vertical development, coal black and huge kind of stuff you look for when you're paragliding—the gust front was coming.
Looking back, my only excuse for getting caught so blindly was the poor functioning of my tired mind. When it slammed us, I was completely unprepared. The wind went from zero to 35 knots in a few seconds. Sharp seas followed instantly. I hadn't even bothered to reef the main sail, which was fully deployed. Discovery careened off course 45 degrees and the autopilot predictably failed to correct. I ran forward to the base of the mast to lower the sail, but when I got there, I stood dumbly for what seemed many minutes doing nothing. The boat was shaking violently. Rain, thunder, and lightning seemed to be assailing us from every direction. Without an autopilot, I couldn't get the pressure out of the sail to lower it. If I blew the main halyard, that's the line that holds the mainsail up, the sail would wrap around the shrouds and break all the battens, which would rip the sail to shreds.
Finally, I snapped out of my stupor and ran back to the helm. I floored the still-running engines, cranked the wheel against the wind, hoping the sail could hold the enormous pressure and went dead into irons. As we rounded up, I ran forward again and blew the main halyard instantly, and thankfully the sail slammed down undamaged in an unorganized mess. I sprinted back to the helm and discovered the starboard engine alarm was blaring. The engine had stalled. Nothing I could do about it now. I unfurled the staysail, staysails the little sail between the jib and the main, and set a course towards land. Screw the fishing nets, I needed rest and cover. As we approached, what I hoped was a usable anchorage after hand-steering through a blizzard of rain and lightning and a parade of tankers for nearly six hours, I remembered I'd fouled the engine. I furrowed the stay sail and let discovery slow.
Without thinking things through very clearly, I grabbed my mask in an underwater light and jumped into the cold, black depths, holding tight to the stern. So, a little more color here. The storm had kind of passed, but it was pitch black. There was no moon. And this is just still so, when I read this and when I think back about this, this is crazy. I put a knife in my mouth and one of the—one of the sheets from the—from the jib when I'd furled it up, and it was just the—the deck was a mess when I—when the main sail came crashing down had gone overboard and gone into the prop, and that's what stalled the engine. So basically, I put a mask on on, put my fins on, put a knife in my mouth and jumped overboard. And, you know, didn't know how fast the boat was going, even though we didn't have any sails up anymore, you know, probably still moving pretty good and didn't have myself even tied in.
So if I wasn't able to get back onto the boat and missed it and you know, that that's it game over. So this was just insanely stupid and just because I was so exhausted. So I jumped over and stuck my hand in the exhaust and kind of the, the prop is about five feet in front of the transom. So I had to kind of use the exhaust and pull myself up and grab onto the prop. And I could just feel it. The, the water's filthy in the Malacca Straits. I couldn't, I wouldn't have been able to see anything anyway. It was midnight, but, um, and I pulled myself up and just kind of start hacking away at the, at the sheet and finally was able to get it all out of there. And I'd I'd have to, I kept coming out and coming up for breath, and going back down and coming up for breath, and going back down and was able to grab the swim ladder when it was all done and come up onto the deck.
And I just sat there for a few minutes going, Jesus, dude, what idiots. So yeah, just an incredibly stupid thing to do. So then I fired up the engines and use the radar and depth sounder to find what I hope would be a good place to get some rest. This is another thing I don't really elaborate on in the story, but it needs some more color. These fish nets are everywhere. They're solid from one guy's to the next, to the next, to the next. So I kind of knew I was just going to be sailing right through them and screw it. I needed an anchor and I needed to sleep. And so I did. I went in and I couldn't see anything on the radar. I just left the shipping lanes a couple of miles and put the anchor down. Then the anchor dragged for an hour and a half and just this really weird silt mud in that part of the world.
And I just sat there looking at the radar and looking at the charts and just kind of nod my head and banging my head into the navigation table because I'd fall asleep. And finally she sat and I just crashed, went to sleep, and woke up the next morning and we were literally the where I'd come in was this tiny little gap that was probably twice as wide as Discovery, and Discovery was 30 foot beam. She's a 57 foot catamaran. And I just totally by dumb luck gone right down this channel between the nets and set the anchor in this huge area that didn't have any nets in the middle of it. So we were kind of in this big swimming pool between all these nets and, uh, woke up to a perfect day, perfectly well rested.
It was unbelievable. Here we go. Yeah. There was only one convoluted path into the spot where we were anchored and somehow we'd managed to negotiate the maze by nothing more than dumb luck. I felt brilliant, as fresh and alive as the day was bright. Discovery and I had been slammed with an impossible test of will, but somehow we'd pulled through. We turned north again and stayed true to our course until we reached Lane Cowley a day and a half later. I remember that period. The autopilot would only last for about 20 minutes at a time, so it was pretty exhausting. I would fall asleep and then realize something would make a sound or something wouldn't feel right. I realized we were going 90 degrees to the course because the the autopilot failed again, but I never could get it fixed until we got the boat out of the water later that year. But more squalls battered us that night, more boats nearly ran us down, more swearing exploded from my mouth at the increase in the unreliable autopilot, but nothing could stop us now.
By the time we'd reached Linkawi where discovery was hauled right on schedule, I was in a pathetic state. But at the same time, I felt a sense of great achievement and incredibly a welling sadness that it was over. Between the battles, there was pristine moments of clarity, precious and rare times of quiet and peace, and some startling expressions of self that I could never do in the company of others. No doubt the experience has made me stronger and hopefully wise enough to never attempt again. And I end the story with a little quote from Peter McWilliams, to avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all. Hope you all enjoyed that. I will get back to regular podcasting as soon as possible. Thanks. See you on the next one. Cheers.
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