5. Philippines again 2018  

Once again we returned to the tropics after a long nice summer in Scandinavia and Bird of Passage was there, waiting for us in Holiday Ocean View Marina. Everything was fine, as usual, but hot hot hot. It takes a few weeks to get used to it.

A lot of new people had arrived to the marina but we also met people we learned to know when we first came here seven months ago. Routines seemed to be the same: Potluck every Friday. Pizza at "Precious Garden" on Wednesdays and Sunday lunch at delicate Alfonsos "Bahai Kubo" in Penaplata.

Terry has a Ford pickup that can take 8 people. Five inside and three more in the back outside. Every sunday he goes to Bahai Kubo for lunch. Alphonse Laurent originally from Switzerland owns this little excellent restaurant where we had many good meals riding back and forth in Terrys pickup.

Many years ago Alfonso was presented with a small black bird in a cage. He felt sorry about the bird being shut in, so he left the door open and as the bird got bigger it spent less time inside the cage. One day it had grown up to become an adult Slender-billed Crow (Sv:Sundakråka, Lat:Corvus enca) and it then left Alfonso but returned again after two years and now lives nearby and often comes to eat from Alfonsos hand. A beautiful bird.

Having sailed more than half way around the world without any substantial maintenance it was now time to do some service to the boat. A new Bimini was one thing. We brought new cloth from home in one of our suitcases and Tove started working. A new cutlass bearing, a new shaft seal, new house batteries, AIS, new varnish, new antifouling, new halyards, new sheets and so on. A long list of jobs and a lot of parts that we brought from home. We took help from the boatyard with a few jobs and were very happy. Cheap and good quality.

The biggest job was to repair the damage to the keel after the accident we had in England 2012. I made a temporary reparation then, but now was a good opportunity to do it permanently with help of cheap labor.

The old deadwood under the keelbox was removed and a new piece of wood was prepared. The best wood I could find was a hardwood named Molave that the Phillipines use for boatbuilding and furniture. Rare and expensive but very good quality. A number of stainless steel cramps were welded to the keelbox and the new deadwood was bolted to the cramps.

The sides were covered with plywood and then everything was glassed with epoxi. The red paint on the last picture is antifouling.The carpenters were good with wood, glassfibre and epoxi. I did very little job myself, only gave instructions and they understood. I think it helped that they used the same relatively primitive tools and methods I used myself when I built Bird of Passage. We were on the same level, so to say.

The marina has a van with a driver that makes three tours every day without charge to the nearest village, Baback. You can get most things you need there. There is also a free minibus that goes every second week to one of the big malls in Davao. This is a longer trip and takes much more time but Davao is a big city and you can find almost anything you need there. Two weeks before christmas we went to G-Mall for big shopping. It happened to be Sherry's birthday so we had lunch and celebrated at a place called the Vikings!

In nearby Baback there is a modern supermarket but also an old style out door market with very cheap fresh meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. Parrotfish has a nice white meat and bones that are easy to remove. Tove removed the scales and wrapped them in alu-foil with spices and after that I put them on the barbecue. Very nice. How to use the small colorful reef fishes I don't know.

We also found an interesting red fruit that we had not tried before. It's called Rambutan and has a nice mild taste.

Dave and Sherry on Soggy Paws came back from a visit to the US with a new drone. Latest technology. The control unit uses a smartphone as display. The birds sitting in the rig did not like it.

It has a good camera that records videos and takes pictures. Sherry gave me these two.

The drone can fly very high but this picture I took myself after climbing the stairs on the hillside just in back of the boatyard.

At the end of the day marina workers gather at the gate to get a ride home with the van.

And as the sun goes down big toads come out from their hidings. I found this one just outside the entrance to the club house.

Most of the boat jobs were finished before the end of the year but we had to wait until the 17:th of Januaray before launching. The reason for this is the primitive method used where the boat is put as far down as possible on the ramp at low tide and you then have to wait six hours for the water to rise and the boat is afloat. The difference between low and high tide varies with the position of the moon and it was not until the 17:th that the high tide was high enough to release us from the cradle.

This ends our Log Book for 2018. The story continues in the Log Book of 2019 with Bird of Passage in the water, leaving the marina and sailing further west.