Life at sea is always adventurous!

Life at sea is an adventurous thing at the best of times - but especially at 2am when a huge squall hits the boat out of nowhere.

The last two nights have been pretty eventful here on Furthur. I wish I meant that we'd been busy partying into the small hours, but unfortunately everyone is sleep deprived for all the wrong reasons. Everything that could have possibly gone wrong recently, has.

The first night we were anchored way off the coast of Borneo, in about 70ft of water. As we were starting to think of going to bed the wind really picked up, basically from nothing. All of a sudden there were 20mph winds - and waves to match.

We were unfortunate that the hatches were still open - Siem was woken by a face full of cold sea water. I tried not to laugh. We staggered around the boat in the swell - picking up the objects that were flying around the boat, and wondering how Captain Brian was still managing to sleep - or if he'd hit his head on something and had been knocked unconscious. Eventually he showed up, and we decided the best thing to do was to leave earlier than planned, as no one was able to sleep anyway.

As I was at the bow of the boat, pulling the anchor up, the chain suddenly popped out of the windlass (the mechanism that slowly pulls up/releases the anchor chain) which meant the chain was in an unstoppable free fall from the boat. I immediately moved away and called Brian - we spent a frustrating couple of minutes trying to slow the chain by jamming a pole into it, so that the safety hook could be flicked on but were not successful. The chain stopped - eventually - as all 600ft of it was already out.

The next several hours were spent in a state of exhausted tension as we watched (through our fingers) as Brian and Lo braved the elements outside and tried to hand pull enough of the chain up to get the hook on. With a few scary moments - the chain ripping loose from their hands and narrowly avoiding pulling Brian into the water with it, we had the chain secure. The force and speed of the chain coming out had knocked the stripper (pulls the chain off the windlass and guides it back into it's locker) which meant I was up at first light, helping Brian to hand pull up all 200m of the heavy chain and feed it into the locker below. Enough exercise for the day!

The following night, already exhausted, we were unfortunate enough to be hit by a second squall - this time whilst we were anchored out of Tawau (the first Malaysian town where we'd just checked into the country). The storm came around 11pm - again from almost no wind to gusts of 35knots+ with big waves. Brian came up relatively quickly to check the boat was secure - and promptly went back to bed despite having a wet bunk (courtesy of another open hatch!).

Lo and Emily in a much less stressful situation

Luckily for everyone, Siem and Emily were not completely distracted by the wifi we were in range of - they noticed that we were a lot closer to a docked cargo ship than we had been - and that all the other cruiser boats had apparantly moved around. Fortunately we'd managed to avoid hitting any of the boats as we'd dragged anchor, and moved at least 150metres. Apologies to Jellyfish and Mind The Gap for the scare! We got the boat moving in double quick time, although still plagued by anchor troubles (electric shocks coming from the chain/hand rail when pulling the anchor up).

It's rare on the boat to see so much exciting action - especially so close together. With a determined captain and competent crew we were able to deal with both situations with as little danger as possible to ourselves or the boat.

Here's to the next adventure!