Today is December 20th and we are snugly bound at Danga Bay Marina in Johor Bahru where we arrived on December 16th after somewhat more difficult crossing than we had expected. Since Murphy has teased us now for weeks I was worried that there would not be room for us here upon arrival, but happily there was still space and we received a warm welcome.

From Labuan we covered 833,6NM to Danga Bay and although this is supposed to be a favourable monsoon for this trip we had to require Mr. Perkins to push for 634,6 of those NM. If there was wind it was for the most part straight on our nose and we got bathed by considerable amount of rain during that trip.
We learned to our astonishment that we have acclimatized to the degree that we put on wool clothes and winter jackets when the temperature went down to 27°C, Kári even got out some socks to keep warm.

We floated through amazing flow of rubbish and floating timber of all sizes and one day I hit a 10m long, 50cm thick log that poor Lady Ann cut in two. It still amazes us how I managed to miss this huge thing on fairly calm water in pure daylight, resulting in Lady Ann's bruised nose.

When we only had few hours to reach the heavy traffic around Singapore we went through so low clouds that we hardly saw the stern of our boat from the cockpit and the rain poured all that day.
It was dark by the time we reached the anchorage and busy shipping lanes with Singapore and by that time there was a strong current and also quite some wind.
We decided to cut in front of a huge ship on anchor (on our way to the shipping lanes), the ship was so big that we talked of it as a good training ground for marathon. As we drew closer to that monster we saw lights starting to dance all over the place on the thing and all of a sudden it started howling at us. We immediately turned to the right, the mainsail flew over, the genoa flapped like crazy and the strong current was straight on our nose now. I honestly thought for a moment that we would simply drift and hit the flipping noisy bully. But eventually we managed to cross the huge monster and when we got back on course we were literally flying at 9 and sometimes 10 kts

After successfully crossing both shipping lanes in the dark we were mighty happy to throw down anchor outside Sg. Rengit and relax until daylight.
We could not but smile though when we got out at daybreak and saw that the dear fishermen had literally fenced us in with their nets and traps. But luckily there was enough breeze for us to take off on sails and we snugly floated out of their domain.

That day turned out to be longer and trickier than we had ever expected. To make a long story short, we had strong current on the nose as well as wind on the nose all day long. For a long time we were moving at 0,5kts and instead of crying, we could not but laugh when at long last we took a turn and then the wind also changed coming straight on the nose as before. But this time we had the current with us, maybe that was the reason we smiled instead of breaking down and crying :-)