Finally floating

March 10th, after almost a month puttering away at various jobs on Sea Turtle while she was on the hard at Marina Island, we finally splashed her back into her natural environment. The first trip was short...less than a hundred metres to the dock where we would do some final preps (N04°12.690' E100°36.104').

Going to sea

It was so nice to retire aboard to the gentle sea motion that rocked us back into sea life.

Then on March 16th, we cast off at 08:30 for an ebullient first passage north. First stop: George Town of Penang Island (Malaysia).

Everything was working well, albeit 1 item - our GPS Receiver which connects to the computer charts and shows our passage track. So we dug out our handheld GPS - which hadn't been used in years - and occasionally checked lat and long to compare manually on the electronic charts. We felt confident to continue as this passage was familiar to us and planned on fixing the problem there.

We motored half the way before the onshore wind built and then had a glorious 8-hour sail under the watch of a half moon until we entered the lee side of Penang Island after dark. We decided to continue up the well marked and lit channel, and under 2 large bridges, to our anchorage in front of the Chew Jetty (N05°24.629' E100°20.568') in George Town at 02:30.