Langkawi - Malaysia

After visiting the islands of Deudab (where Russ managed to score some nice waves) and Breueh, we got to our little refuge of Pulau Rubiah, where to our surprise other 5 boats where happily moored. Busy! We had a great time with the other cruisers and met some interesting locals. Dodent is the dive shop owner in Pulau Weh and he is the one whom put down the moorings for the sailboats for free! His reason behind that is an attempt to save the very little coral left in the Rubiah area after the tsunami. On top of that Dodent has an amazing coral replanting program which is in full swing at the moment. They place concrete blocks in certain parts of the bay and "replant" some coral on it. Their success rate is really encouraging. Dodent is a kind of lone fighter there though. He is having a hard time with the authorities that don't like the boats moored there in "hiding" and rather have them anchored in Sabang. However the anchorage in Sabang is awful and mooring or not, no one would be there, but the authorities don't see to see that and give poor Dodent a hard time. He is winning the coral battle though and we were very pleased to see an Indonesian so in tune with the ecology and genuinely concerned for the place's future.

Eventually we managed to de-tangle ourselves from Rubiah and headed for Penang, but wind and possible work ended up taking us up to Langkawi instead. So here we are back to Malaysia and slowly getting used to the whole civilization thing: ice cream, ice, tidiness etc etc, however the odd lady covered with a black burka with only her eyes out did wake us up to the fact that we are still very much in Muslim country.


The crossing was great - as far as crossings go - and we managed to sail half of the 270 miles we covered. Now the big surprise was finding a huge water spout on the way! It was terrorisingly
amazing.
Check the photo out