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So the first “Excellent Adventure” has come to a successful end. Overall it was an interesting trip which brought us to a few familiar places as well as a few new ones. We were presented with daily challenges throughout the trip - some as easy as organizing sandwiches for the following day’s trip, others as complicated as making spare parts for the boat out in 3 ft seas. We got back in touch with a lot of old friends and made some new ones along the way. |
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The sum of our challenges ultimately led to us re-routing the adventure to El Nido, and then back to Manila via Apo Reef, Pandan, and Subic. We also slowed the tempo of the trip down in the last two legs to allow us to enjoy a little bit more of the places we visited fish a bit, and do a few dives on some of the wrecks in the Calamian Islands as well as the spectacular Apo Reef. Our first major challenge started even before we left Manila as one of our crew, Marjorie, discovered she was a boy according to her birth certificate and only discovered this when she applied for a passport. Situations like this are not uncommon in the Philippines if Mommy & Daddy didn’t carefully examine the papers they signed. This made the trip to Malaysia impossible for Marjorie, but she tells me in the meanwhile that she will be a girl some time in mid May according to whatever office is responsible for these things in Puerto Galera. Let’s keep our fingers crossed! |
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Our second major challenge was getting away from Boracay. The fuelling procedure proved to be somewhat complicated in many regards. Procuring diesel requires a lot of containers, tricycles, dinghies, and siphoning in the wake of bangkas which are constantly buzzing around during re-fueling. This wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Adam and Michael. The challenge with the diesel continued after we fought our way through 10 ft. seas when we eventually escaped from Boracay (late due to 15 ft seas the day before, which was actually a challenge in its own right). Once we finally got into more reasonable seas somewhere just west of the Gigantes Islands, we noticed a loss of power on our port engine and then black smoke coming out of the exhaust. The black smoke eventually became white smoke and our problems progressively got worse as we limped all the way to Malapascua instead of our originally intended Bantayan Island. We were a bit shaken up from the tedious ride through rough water and problems that we incurred on the port engine, that we didn’t bother trying to repair anything ourselves, but rather decided to get an early start on to Cebu and look for someone there to help us out. |
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After getting out to the boat the next morning we were presented with our third major challenge. The area to which we were directed the evening before was apparently too shallow at low tide for us (despite reassurance from people with local knowledge of the beach). The drives had been tripped up, and were not going down. After 30 minutes we managed to get the drives down by touching a few bits of wire to the contacts on the trim motor and connecting directly to the battery, and were on our slow way to Cebu. |
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Rod Hegerty directed us to Fin at the Cebu Yacht Club for help getting our mechanical problems sorted out. After thorough examination of the engines and fuel system, a clog in the fuel line was discovered. The cause of lost power and smoke was fuel starvation! The junk that came out of the tank was unbelievable, and we suspect that a major contributor was the diesel from Boracay. Thanks Fin for sorting out the fuel system as well as all of the other little problems we didn’t even know we had! The two lessons learned from the first set of problems are that if you have enough fuel to get to Roxas Panay from Boracay - fill up in Roxas, and the second is that having your engines serviced by the dealer has no correlation with the mechanical soundness of the machines! |
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The next (fourth) major challenge came in Panglao. We were once again directed to a mooring, and were reassured several times from more than one person that the water around the mooring had sufficient depth to leave our boat over night. Foiled again! Our early morning departure was met with not one, but 4 broken propellers which had been smashing on a coral head for a few hours the night before! As if this wasn’t enough, the force of the blows to the drives forced a hydraulic line out of the steering ram. Luckily we could patch up the steering and manage to get to Siquijor, and eventually Bonbonon where Nigel assisted us in getting our propellers changed and steering hooked up and bled properly. Broadwater Marine was once again instrumental in getting us desperately needed spares in a hurry! |
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The fifth major challenge materialized on the trip to Guimaras, when we noticed a great deal of flex in the deck of our ride. Apparently all of the rough seas and smashing on corals knocked a stringer loose. We had a 200 mile trip back to El Rio y Mar, which was the next place we could reasonably do that type of repair, and we definitely couldn’t continue much further without fixing it. Asiacraft designated a few workers to go to Busuanga to carry out the work, but getting material was a challenge because resin can’t fly! After a few dozen phone calls, Andy from Sangat came to the rescue with resin and hardener, and Tequila had some fiberglass somewhere in his shop. After 4 days of Haitian haul-out on the beach of El Rio, we were ready to go – but decided not to tempt fate and slow the trip down. |
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Our sixth major challenge was getting diesel in El Nido during Holy Week. Somehow we managed to scrounge 40l here, 20l there and eventually got about 1.5 miles from Sangat before one engine ran out of fuel. Jojo and Andy again came to the rescue and provided us with enough diesel to get us around to El Rio where we had a few drums waiting for us. |
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We were getting pretty challenged out, and were actually glad to be back in familiar waters. The last major challenge came on the way to Pandan. The starboard engine was overheating, and upon inspection of the sea strainer, klutzy me dropped the pressure plate down in the engine room underneath the hot engine. With 35 miles left to go, and one hour of sunlight – the prospect of doing 12 knots to safety didn’t appeal to me, so I decided to fabricate a pressure plate from my Tupperware soap container. In 15 minutes we were back to two engines, and shot off to Pandan. This proved to be the last major challenge on our trip, and we actually relaxed on the last 3 days. We learned a lot, and know of a few things which we will do differently next time! |
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Despite all of the challenges, we can only recommend traveling through the Philippines by boat to anyone who has the opportunity. This is the best way to see the country from a perspective that most will never experience. We hope that our little adventure and the few stories and pictures that we put up will encourage a few more people to venture out on similar journeys to the places we visited on this adventure or some of the other beautiful places in the Philippines. |
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Major factors for the success of undertaking such a journey were both logistical and financial support. We were very fortunate to have a lot of friends who supported us with places to stay, obtaining fuel, spare parts, installing spare parts, jerry rigging the boat, or supporting our beer-fund! Links to all of the people who supported us are at the bottom of the page, but we would like to present a brief summary for some of our supporters on the pages under the trip review. |
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