The busy quay in Kumai, which traffic have to reach in near zero visibility during the burning season.

October is the end of the dry season in Borneo, so it is when the crop fields are burnt, in the hope that the rains at the beginning of the wet season will extinguish any that run out of control and will wash the nutrients into the soil. So far so good for the farming community, but for the maritime community it delivers a period of very poor visibility. Arriving at the entrance to the Kumai River at night, we anchored outside and waited until morning to enter in daylight.

Except there never really was any daylight. We tapped our fingers impatiently from 0530 hrs, waiting for the penetrating rays of the sun to pierce the gloom and light our way. Having been at sea for the previous three days we knew to the minute what time the sun should rise, but this day felt like the closing chapters of Lord of the Rings, an eternal un-nerving twilight.

Despite a full compliment of electronics Brian dusts off the sextant.

By 0630 hrs we decided to lift the anchor and enter on radar and the echo sounder. We had no idea how accurate the charts were but at least the electronic charts on the computer screen described the shape of the spit we needed to follow. Then as luck would have it, through the gloom appeared a local cargo boat, so we tucked in behind it. With only a couple of hundred yards visibility, had it passed any farther from us we would not have seen it.

After a short distance our guide veered sharply off to starboard. By the time we had made the necessary course adjustment it had swung back the other way, as though it was trying to shake us off, but doggedly we hung on. Then the penny dropped. The skipper was looking for the entrance buoy. The boat had no radar. The buoy was a clear blip on our radar screen. Maybe it should be following us. However this was a boat that had travelled all the way from Java to the entrance of Kumai by dead reckoning (no radar so we presumed no GPS) and would surely have local knowledge. No doubt he did but how much good does that do you in smoky fog? Especially when we saw that a crewmember was swinging a lead - they had no echo sounder.

	A bridge too low? Not quite, we just squeezed under it.

With hindsight we would have been better off not to have seen our guide. We would have entered using our electronics without too much stress and a lot less veering around trying to test the limits of the channel.

It did make us realise how much we take the electronics for granted. Which is why, when a week later sailing from Kumai to Singapore, we were caught in the middle of a terribly violent thunderstorm, we resorted to what may seem to be rather peculiar measures to protect them.

As jagged streaks of lightning stabbed at the sea around us, into the microwave went the handheld VHF, echo sounder and spare GPS, in the hope that it would act as a Faraday cage and protect them if we were struck. One bit of high tech equipment protecting another.

The laptop would not fit into the microwave so went into the cooker. We taped up the controls to avoid cooking them accidentally.

Not the most pleasant night at sea but we survived to tell the tale. This area has the greatest intensity of lightning activity anywhere in the world. There are several other hotspots on the usual cruiser's route, e.g. the Bay of Panama, so if you are heading this way you might want to consider your strategy and your boat's lightning protection arrangements. Several boats are struck each year in the Malacca Straits.

Had we been hit we would undoubtedly have lost many of our electronics. Had the losses included those items in the microwave we would have been reduced to navigating by dead reckoning and a sextant (not an easy task considering the rainstorms and smoke haze). Despite our high tech spec of electronics we still carry two sextants, and within days they were called into use, not in the absence of the electronics but in combination with them.

Having survived the lightning storm we rewarded ourselves with a few quiet days cruising in the Riau islands, south of Singapore. We were planning to work our way through a gap between several small islands, then as we rounded a headland a bridge appeared. Down went the anchor while we contemplated the barrier ahead. Out came the sextant and by taking the angle of the maximum point of clearance and the distance to the bridge from the radar, we were able to calculate that it was a little over 30 metres high (we need about 23 metres). We passed safely underneath next morning, not without some stress concerning the accuracy of our maths memory and the use of the tan function.

Singapore harbour is our next challenge, and we are hoping to make it without any more demands on our electronics or our nerves.

NOTES:
Nigel Calder (Boatowner's Mechanical and Electrical Manual) recommends using a lightning rod. We do not have one but are considering fitting one. Although some people fear that the rod itself increases the likelihood of a strike, the evidence doesn't support this. Steve Dashew suggested using the brush style rods (also described in Nigel Calder's book).