I spent my first day back on KV Kismet catching up on some sleep and getting moved back in. Kevin was traumatized by the rough passage from Indonesia to the Philippines and wanted to get motoring up north as quickly as possible. But first, we needed to do some provisioning, I needed a phone card, and I wanted to see if I could extend my visa.
Kevin rented a scooter and we scooted to a nearby mall. I asked why we weren’t going to immigration first and he said we were. Apparently, in the Philippines, many government offices are located in the mall, alongside cell phone kiosks and accessory stores. I found this both funny and convenient. I submitted my paperwork and 30 minutes later I was walking out with a 30-day extension. I definitely wasn’t in Indonesia anymore where the process took me 3 in-person visits and over two weeks. So far, the Philippines has turned out to be super easy.
Next, I picked up a SIM card grabbed some provisions, and then headed back to the boat. Kevin wanted to leave the next day and indicated the trip going north would be terrible, a lot of bashing. Normally, this would give me anxiety but now whenever I felt the anxious feeling come up, just told myself “everything is going to work out” and did my best to let the feeling go, trusting things would turn out fine. I refocused my attention on trip planning. Kevin hadn’t done much research about what to do now that he was in the Philippines so I got to work, reading different forums, Facebook groups, and any tips I could find from cruising or scuba groups.
I began making a list of anywhere that had good diving and created a route of how to get us there along with any potential anchorages along the way. We planned to do about 40-50 miles per day which would get us up to our first destination, Coron, by the end of the week.
We decided to eat at the yacht club for dinner that night since neither of us felt like cooking. We began chatting with some local women, and one of them offered me to try a local delicacy called balut. I don’t consider myself a picky eater but if there is one thing in this world I won’t try, it’s that. Balut is a partially developed duck embryo and I sat in disgust as I watched her crack it open and show me the tiny fetus, slipping the juices. She mentioned you can get embryos of different ages, obviously the more developed the more crunchy from the bones. Yuck!
The next morning, Kevin got up early and pulled lines off the mooring ball while I slept in, still trying to recover from my long flights. Then, we spent the next 11 hours motoring into the wind and 3-6 foot seas strait on the nose. It certainly wasn’t the most comfortable point of sail but something just felt off… I wasn’t anxious and quite relaxed. Strange.
We made it to our first anchorage just before sunset and dropped the hook as a steady flow of giant bats began emerging from the island. It was mesmerizing to watch, and it felt like watching a giant flock of birds but on mute since bats don’t seem to make any audible noises.
The next day was a lot like the first. We left at first light and motored until sunset in, the same conditions as before. We decided to take a break the next day, sleep in, and just do a few hours of motoring to an island called Cassian Island. The woman eating the duck egg told us to go there if we wanted to do some snorkeling and see turtles. Always! Once anchored we grabbed our snorkel and launched the tender, it wasn’t clear where this snorkeling area was so we just tried out a few different places. I was disappointed to find poor visibility but the saddest part was the lack of fish and healthy corals. I did see one turtle but it swam off as fast as it could once it saw me, leading me to wonder if maybe they eat turtles here.
The next day we kept moving and tried to navigate behind some islands to get protection from the swell. This was a great strategy until we found ourselves lost in a maze of hundreds of buoys, an oyster farm. Luckily, one of the oyster farmers saw we were stuck and motored over to help us navigate out. We continued on our way, doing our best to avoid the oyster farms and other small, hard-to-see objects sticking out of the water waiting to wrap the propellor. We never figured out what these other objects were but assumed they were some kind of fishing device.
We continued motoring until we eventually arrived at a U-shaped island where we planned to anchor until we did anchor and found it to be very poor holding and rolly. With just an hour of sunset left, we debated if we had enough time to make it to a different anchorage that might not be any better protected. Given the reef, oysters, and fish traps, navigating at night wasn’t an option. We quickly pulled the anchor and then motored as fast as we could to the next anchorage which was completely exposed to the South China Sea to the west. Luckily, it seemed the sea was much calmer than when Kevin experienced it a few weeks prior and we found ourselves in a completely flat, calm bay. The next day, we would be arriving at our destination: Coron.
I suppose most of this blog post was just a long way to say, it took several long days of motoring to get up north. Honestly, not much noteworthy happened. It wasn’t that comfortable but it wasn’t that horrible either. It seemed the less anxiety I had, the less there was to be anxious about. It began to feel like maybe the universe was just mirroring my energy back to me in some strange way.
