Wednesday, June 27, 2012

While at Porto del Sol watching Denny get ready to leave, we took a dinghy ride up the river with Greg and Grace. We went about 4 miles up the river. It was completely enclosed by mangroves. Very nice ride.


Greg and Grave. Greg is the one who sent me the plans for the dinghy.


A house on the river.

After Porto del Sol we went to the old leper colony at Culion. We took a tour of the museum there. It was closed as a leper colony in the 80's. A nice clean small village now.
The emblem on the hill is made of white painted rocks. The hospital is the buildings center, up from the beach.


The grammer here is NOT the same standard as in the states, but Trinda had to pose by this sign while we waited for the museum to open.

Then last week on our way to Puerto Princesa we discovered an anomaly in the charted position of a reef! There was a seaweed farm in the bay we were planning to anchor in. They tie 6 or 8 buoys together then drop ropes down with the seaweed on them. And do this all over the bay. There were hundreds of buoys that we could not sail over for fear of catching one of the ropes on the prop. We had a track from the GPS of a friend who had successfully anchored here a few weeks ago, missing all the buoys. But the local security guy insisted we follow him safely through the buoys, so we did. Just past the buoys he said "OK. Just go that way and pointed vaguely to the back of the bay. I decided we should go back to the track we had been following. I left a good 200 yards to go around the marked coral reef between me and the track. Then bump, bump BUMP! and the boat stopped. It was the middle of the out going high tide of the day. Within minutes the boat was too far out of the water to pull it off. So we sat there and gradually leaned over. It took 12 hours to go down and come back up. About 9 in the morning we floated off.
Trinda demonstrating the angle we spent most of the night.


The horizon is supposed to be level with the solar panels!