The 150-mile trip from Telaga Harbour, in Langkawi, Malaysia, to Phuket, Thailand, is normally a pretty easy trip. But as Santa Cruz-based cruiser Tom Van Dyke of the Searunner 31 tri En Point reports, “A big blow during the past two weeks has been wreaking havoc . . . as typhoon activity in the Philippines and China has been sucking air up from the Indian Ocean and across the peninsula.” Two of Van Dyke’s cruising friends, George Juri and Grit Chiu, aboard the Alberta, Canada-based Hunter 50 Escape, caught the brunt of those conditions while sailing north toward Phuket last week, but the weather wasn’t the only memorable aspect of their trip.
Van Dyke explains that on July 9, Escape was seven days out of Langkawi, “and had made just 100 miles island hopping between almost constant 30-knot winds with gusts into the 50s, when they spotted a man floating in the water between Koh Lanta and Koh Ngai.” Read More
