Category: Ports

What to say about Singapore? It’s an unquestionably beautiful city, made that way by culture and climate and wealth, draped with garden vines and sprinkled with green open spaces offsetting a pleasing combination of colorful, classic architecture mixed with ultra-modern glass high-rises and mega-malls. Broad, well-paved, tree-lined boulevards arc through the low hills, weaving among garden stores and restaurants, the occasional mansion peering through the manicured jungle.

It’s surprisingly affordable, apart from housing, and the people were unfailingly polite and friendly—friendlier even than Bangkok, where a certain bored apathy often overtakes the land of smiles, and clerks and shopkeepers sometimes act as if you’re simply an obstacle between them and more screen time with their cellphone. Though Singapore is ranked #1 among smartphone adoption worldwide, there was none of that here. I don’t think any clerk or server failed to smile and thank me for my business.

It’s known as a strict, rigid city-state, a democracy with many of the conventional democratic freedoms curtailed… “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” as William Gibson once put it.

Gibson saw a draconian police-state dedicated to taking all the edges off, to reducing cultural dissent and expression into formulaic output designed to avoid introducing any unwelcome complications into the thundering economic machine the island had become. He lamented the lack of nightlife, the oppressive authoritarian niceness, the bland music and arts scene… a sort of acceptably commercialized utopia with the creativity stamped out of it to reduce disharmony.

Either it’s changed a lot or he didn’t walk the streets of Little India on his visit. An adult entertainment store sat alongside open air restaurants, 24-hour shops selling dubious electronics, and music blared well into the late hours from suspiciously lit places with the shutters closed across the street. Heck, there was trash in the gutters.

Or, perhaps the thesis of his essay (if it had a thesis) was right, and the Internet, having stampeded wholesale onto the island in the interval between our visits, has genuinely changed the place.

Coming away after only a longish weekend of the place, my perspective may be similarly uninformed. But the history, which Gibson goes into briefly, seems to me to explain a lot about the approach the government has taken–indeed, has been constitutionally mandated to take, in many cases–to ensuring multicultural harmony in a vividly disparate collection of traditions.

It all rings strangely to anyone from the melting pot countries, where a sameness of culture carries much of the burden for producing inter-cultural harmony. Singapore’s approach doesn’t strike me as the best one, but it’s aimed at a similar problem, and the jury is still out on how well the American experiment, and others in the same vein, have actually run.

There’s a tendency, perhaps a universal one but surely common among American’s generally and myself in particular, to default to the assumption that our system is the best system, and to evaluate others primarily in the ways where they fail on that scorecard. Singapore, with its sometime draconian legal system, has much to pick at for anyone reared on American exceptionalism.

Yet it’s a functioning democracy, with a voter turnout reliably over 90 percent (a number that puts ours to shame), so those laws at least have the overwhelming approval of a multicultural society. And if American government ran so effectively, would our rancorous voters be inclined to flip political control as frequently as we do?

I don’t have answers, right or wrong. But it is another in a series of examples to me that there are any number of ways to organize and run governments and societies in this world that people end up being generally okay with (Thailand’s compassionately libertarian system of corruption being another… at least for now).

Anyway, I didn’t spend the trip meditating on politics or good governance–I went to see the sights. And the sights, for the most part, are outdoors.

Manicured though it may be, Singapore’s small remaining slices of jungle felt more jungly to me than anywhere else I have been in Southeast Asia. Granted, I try to stay out of the boondocks, but have been to several Thai national parks in various parts of the country. All of them were more crowded than Singapore’s Central Water Catchment, despite the comparative size and populations of the countries. That may have something to do with the apparently abundant wildlife we saw in and along the Tree Top Walk there, despite the ever-present reminders that we were, in fact, in the middle of a teeming city-state island.

We took a bus to the park, following our AI overlord’s directions. These proved to be imperfect, trying to take us down a lonely access road without sidewalks that would have been boring hiking indeed, but we stopped and looked at the map and thought for ourselves for a moment and found a nearby trailhead instead.

Not twenty yards in from the busy street, I glimpsed a small boar rooting through the undergrowth just off the trail. A couple hundred yards past that, a large lizard commandeered the path for a minute or so, the first of many of them we would see on and around the hike. Squirrels darted through the limbs and birds and insects chattered all around. Macaques went up and down trees and hung upside down overhead as if gravity simply didn’t matter while they groomed one another or searched for food.

It was sweltering, with a rare breath of breeze sneaking down the trail every once in a while to provide ever-so-slight relief. Two kilometers in, we reached a small ranger station near the tree-top walk where there was a drinking fountain. A medium-sized macaque was investigating the secure garbage can there, scaling a small sapling behind it with practiced technique to gain access to the lid. While he was working out how to get it open, a couple of the park maintenance personnel came around a corner pushing a cart. The monkey dropped to the ground immediately and began casually looking around in other directions–anywhere but toward the garbage bin. I could almost hear him whistling innocently as the workers walked past.

If I had thought about it ahead of time, I would have realized that getting to a tree top walk would necessitate some climbing… to the top, no less, of some trees. But having failed to consider this, I found myself some three kilometers in and faced with a hike up a hill to the entry to the bridge. It was strung, sensibly, across a valley, so access was from either ridge line.

We were glad of the slog up the hill once we stepped out onto the slightly swaying bridge deck. Finally, yards above the foliage, a cool breeze jetted past, blowing the sweat away. Down below, birds flitted through the canopy and we were mercifully spared any sightings of the flying snakes that various signs posted warnings about.

Instead, it was on the boardwalk on the other side of the tree walk that we encountered the snake.

Like a submarine raising its periscope, his head emerged from the gap between the slats about ten feet in front of us, took a leisurely spin to survey the terrain, and then slithered out onto the walk… fortunately headed in the opposite direction. I froze in place and managed to not wet my pants while we gave him plenty of time to get wherever he was going.

After that encounter, I was ready to get back to the concrete jungle.

Museums are reliably air conditioned so we went to a couple of them: the National Museum and the National Gallery. I found myself wishing I had had more time to wander around; we didn’t end up catching everything in the National Gallery, even discounting the fact that Microsoft had taken over the upper floor for some event or another.

But even after museums close, there’s always the mall. Like every other Asian country, Singapore is overrun with them. We went to a couple, including one near our hotel that had a sort of multi-level bouncy-ball playground suspended in the airy spaces between the floors, putting American malls to shame.

In the intervals, when the heat was bearable, we walked around and enjoyed the street food. It’s not actually on the street, Singapore being too tidy for any such rowdiness, but instead in large, open-air buildings that amount basically to food malls. In one of them, in Chinatown, you can get the world’s cheapest Michelin-starred meal, a bowl of noodle’s for a buck and a half U.S.

The locals eat out as much as they do in Bangkok, but concentrated in these massive eateries, so the tiny little spaces are seriously industrial kitchen spaces–they turn out a lot of food during meal times.

For a more relaxing space to hang out in, we visited a local cat cafe. We’re both big fans of the Caturday Cafe in Bangkok, so we thought we’d try out something to compare it to: Cafe Neko No Niwa, on Boat Quay along the Singapore River. The experience was… very Singaporean.

In contrast to the Caturday, you have to pay a flat fee to enter the cat room. Supervision is intense: three employees keep a watchful eye on you the entire time you are inside. There are only a handful of cats, all of them rescues, and during our visit, their sole preoccupation was on the door to the outside world. They had the look and behavior of the condemned, hoping against hope that the next escape attempt would be successful.

It was a bit sad, and perhaps because of that, it was fairly sparsely attended. Monica attempted futilely to attract the attention of the napping cats (although not too fervently, it being against the rules to wake a sleeping cat), and we finished our drinks and left.

And I guess that was pretty much our Singapore visit in a nutshell. Although it’s an attractive, organized, friendly, and interesting place, there’s just something a little bland about it… just a lot of people getting up, going to work, buying phone accessories, and doing it all again the next day. Not even the trash in the streets really livens it up.

A lot of times, when I visit someplace new and charming, I find myself looking up the cost of apartments, checking out phone plans, thinking about other things I’d like to explore if I was there longer… a few weeks, a few months. But with Singapore, I didn’t bother. It wouldn’t bother me to go back again, but I probably wouldn’t make a point of it.

I guess Gibson was right after all!

It’s been my reality for the past couple of years that, no matter where I am at or what I am doing, I seem to always be more looking forward to the next big thing. It’s not that I’m not enjoying what I’m doing, it just seems like my attention skips perpetually ahead. Before I left Seattle last fall, all I could think about was Southeast Asia. While I was in Southeast Asia, all I could think about was Scotland. And in Scotland, mostly what I wanted was to be back home sailing.

Now I’m out sailing. And mostly I’m thinking about Southeast Asia again.

Which is silly when I look around me. There are record high temperatures here in Puget Sound, sunshine and fine sailing weather, and I should be soaking it in.

But I’ll leave off a deeper dive into that apparent defect in my mental processes for another time and just talk about the current trip.

I had hoped to spend most of June out on the water but I didn’t get away from the dock until about a week in. My flexible solar panel gave up the ghost sometime over the winter, the only really major system that had any issues, and I was waiting around for new panels and parts to show up before taking off.

Of course, that didn’t give me any time to install them, but one thing about sitting out at anchor without any electricity is that it really incentivizes you to get on with the project. And there’s nothing else to do until you get the juice flowing. So I figured I’d get fitted out along the way. There are half-dozen other small projects that have been on the agenda and along with enjoying the weather, I hoped to make a dent in several of them.

Naturally, I did not. Or not much of a dent, anyway.

My initial destination was Port Townsend, the starting line of that recent Pacific Northwest sailing tradition and instant classic, Northwest Maritime Center’s Race to Alaska.

I was there for the first R2AK start, covering it for Three Sheets Northwest, and I’ve been to most of the rest (all of them, I thought… then I tried to picture last year’s start and couldn’t do it. I tried to remember where I was in June of last year and it turns out I have absolutely no memory of that month. Alien abduction or old age?). It’s generally a good time and a little excitement so I planned to be there this year as well.

I ran into obstacles right from the start, however. I can manage the boat all right once I get out in open water, but getting from my Salmon Bay-located marina out onto salt water requires traversing the Ballard Locks. I’d never done it on my own and had no desire to do so, so I lined up a friend and promised a day sail if he’d help me out through the locks.

But the night before, something came up and he couldn’t make it. Since I was already running behind my self-appointed schedule, I decided to just bite the bullet and give it a shot. I figured that going outbound would at least be easier than coming in alone–at the level of the lake, the lock attendants can offer a little more assistance, and I’d almost certainly be in the small lock, where you can tie up and not have to mind the lines later.

Just getting to the locks was a minor adventure itself, however. Another fellow on my dock helped me with the lines getting out of my tight slip and a research boat bottling up the tight fairway kindly repositioned themselves so I could get out into the ship canal. The locks are only a half mile away, so I figured that would be the easy part.

Then the engine died.

I had swapped my primary fuel filter that morning so I had a pretty good idea what the problem was… I thought I’d bled the lines sufficiently and let it run long enough to prove it, but I’ve been fooled before. The middle of the ship canal is no place to be fiddling with the engine, however. I swing the wheel hard over and with what momentum I had left got into a dock at Ballard Oil.

The fellows there were kind enough to give me a few minutes (not that I could have moved anyway!) to re-bleed the Yanmar. That did the trick. Heart still hammering, I swung back out to give the locks another shot, wondering what else could go wrong.

Naturally, they put me into the large lock, and along the wall.

I had my long lines out and set up, fortunately (because I thought if I rigged them, I’d never have to use them!) so I got up alongside and tied up okay. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I was going to pay them out both by myself as the water levels dropped.

The attendants had an answer for me–they rafted a little runabout off me and asked if one of the folks on board would give me a hand.

The skipper was happy to do so, and it turned out he was an old hand at it. At one time, he said, he’d run the crew that installed and removed the log boom out on Lake Washington for the Seafair hydro races. So he’d been through the locks a lot and had no trouble minding the line.

Once I got out into Shilshole Bay my heart rate dropped a little. I decided to jump across the Apple Tree Cove at Kingston to spend the night before heading up to Port Townsend. It can be a long day to get that far north. Kingston isn’t a big chunk of it, but it knocks about five miles off so, when I’m soloing it, it feels worth it.

Apple Tree Cove isn’t a great anchorage but I didn’t expect to be there long. But an alignment of weather and tide conditions is important when going north through Admiralty Inlet, and when the forecast didn’t work out, I ended up staying there a few days.

As it happened, I might as well have just gone and gotten it over with.

My ideal day starts off with light or nonexistent winds, so I can get the anchor and sails up on my own without much trouble. Then the winds would build, the current ebb to sweep me north, and I would have a fine day of sunshine and sailing ahead.

On the actual day of departure, I got the current, but not much else. The wind was whipping as it was time to leave. I raised the mainsail first and let it flog while I worked on getting the anchor up. It’s almost impossible to raise the main alone in any kind of wind–there’s no one else to mind the helm and the boat continually falls off and jams the sail in the track.

With no windlass, getting the anchor up isn’t a picnic, either. I lead the rode back to a primary winch and crank… and crank… and crank. Then there’s a lot of running back and forth to secure the thing and stow the rode. I can have a full day of work in before I ever get out of the anchorage.

I took my time, though, doing things bit by bit (all while dodging the ferries coming in and out of the cove) and eventually got it all squared away enough to head north. As I rounded Apple Tree Point and caught sight of Whidbey Island in the distance, dark clouds boiled over the entrance to the Inlet. A bolt of lightning lanced down into the water ten miles directly in front of me, and sent me scurrying back behind the point. Not an auspicious beginning!

Rain poured down, turned to hail, then frothed off across the Sound, leaving me rocking in its wake. To add insult to injury, the blasting wind abruptly left with it, forcing me to start the engine around Point No Point and motor the rest of the way north. The best I can say about the trip was that the seas were fairly calm.

Life improved as I got the anchor down in Port Townsend, though. The sun came out and the anchorage was fairly empty. It’s not a great anchorage, perhaps even worse than Apple Tree Cove, and I have bad luck there–once summer I got run into or swung into three different times.

But this year no one anchored too close and the southerly winds that can make life miserable there were absent, so I enjoyed my week or so hanging around. I got the wiring installed for the panels and took some measurements for mounting them but my battery-operated drill wasn’t up to getting all the brackets drilled out. At least I could set them out in the cockpit and keep my batteries charged up, with power to spare.

I spent some fine mornings at Better Living Through Coffee and caught a movie at the Rose and caught up with friends I hadn’t seen since last December or longer.

The R2AK start itself, the event I’d ostensibly come for, proved remarkably sedate. Stately, even.

Yes, that’s the Red Army Choir singing the Russian National Anthem. No, I don’t know why that was the song they chose to launch the race. It’s Port Townsend!

The race is still going on and I’m following it online… some day, I’d like to see more of it from further north.

But I have time constraints this year and had to head back to Seattle again by the end of June.

The thing about solo sailing is that it affords a lot thinner margins than normal around weather conditions. I look for much narrower ranges of wind and tide conditions now, because if anything adverse happens, I just don’t have enough hands to deal with it.

So rather than trap myself on the other side of the gates to the North Sound or islands, I took advantage of a lovely sailing day the weekend after the race start and zipped back down to the central sound. Here, I’m in easy reach of Shilshole, where I need to be to meet the assistance I have recruited to get back through the locks again. Because of his schedule, I have to return a little earlier than planned, but I find myself a little grateful for it rather than resentful at not having longer. Maybe I’m not enjoying myself as much as I thought!

I anchored one night in Port Madison, which is comparable to Port Townsend in terms of exposure, and then motored with the tide through Agate Pass into Liberty Bay off Poulsbo. The community wifi is within reach of my mast-mounted antenna. I even get Seattle television stations over the air, not that there is much worth watching (Jeopardy, tho…).

But despite the easy, even luxurious conditions for living at anchor, I find myself looking ahead again instead of enjoying where I’m at. I’m already thinking about being–wishing I was–back in my slip again. Plotting my next trip to somewhere else…