On Thu, 04 Jun 2015 05:57:14 -0600, Paul Cassel
wrote:

On 6/4/2015 5:24 AM, wrote:


I was in Singapore and on the hard doing the bottom when I met a guy
who had ordered a "Cornish Shrimper" from England. It arrived in
Singapore in a 20 ft. shipping container. The yard got it in the water
and rigged it and the guy - very obviously - learned to sail in the
bay and a few days later he and his wife sailed off for Thailand. I
saw that they had some sort of one burner cooking stove, a tarpaulin
to make a tent over the boom at night and that was about all. His
charts consisted of some road maps but no compass or GPS.

I never saw the guy again but a year or so later I saw his boat in a
marina in Thailand and asked the Marina Manager about him. He had
sailed all the way, no outboard, from Singapore to Thailand, along
shore all the way. When they got low on food they stopped and went to
the local market and bought more. The manager said he had asked the
guy how he got across the gulf - most people would sail N.E. from
Southern Thailand across the gulf to the mouth of the Chao Paya river
- and the guy said nope he didn't try that.

From looking at a chart it appeared to be about a 1,000 mile voyage,
in an open sail boat.

The Marina Manager said that the boat was for sale and the guy had
said that he was glad he had made the trip but didn't think he wanted
to do it again :-)


I guess you'd have to call that minimal sailing :-)
--

I'll say. One of my ambitions that I'll likely never realize is running
the ICW in a very small shoal draft boat with maybe a cuddy cabin. It
may be like that shrimper but add the hard cabin rather than the tarp
boom. I'd also like a very shallow draft like the Mac 26. I can see the
icebox, porta pottie and one burner camping stove.

I did a few parts of the ICW in the big boat but with an almost 6'
draft, I had to stick to the main channel and even then worry about
tides as a few places weren't at clearance depth any more.

As I went, I kept being intrigued by what I was passing but could not
approach.

-paul

There is a lot to be said for a boat that can float in shallow water
:-)

A lot of the small islands on the west coast of Thailand aren't very
well charted. They are in the right place on the chart but the water
depth might have been surveyed 50 or 60 years ago and coral grows :-)

We were on the way back to Phuket, from Malaysia, and decided to stop
for the night. The N.E. monsoons were in full spate so we eased up on
the S.W. side of a small island and went aground on the coral. We had
run in between to big coral growths and were essentially in a "cradle"
and couldn't get out.

The story ended well as when the tide went out the water was shallow
enough that I could sort of chart the water and a small, local fishing
boat had come by and hauled the anchor out toward open water and
promised to come back at high tide. Twelve hours later we floated off
and winched ourselves out into deep water and the fishing boat came
back and led us to a better anchoring spot.

The moral of the story is "you probably can't go where the fishing
boats go :-)
--
Cheers,

Bruce