Turtle Island to Kinabantang River
We departed the Turtle Islands for Sandakan on 28 July 2024. Sandakan is a large town, pop about half a 500,000 and a main trading port for oil, sago, tobacco and timber. We anchored outside the Sandakan Yacht Club in pretty grubby water, with the pleasant smells of the local fish markets, the nearby palm oil factory and the occasional sewerage outpour. Warren wanted to commission the water maker here, but I strongly objected.
The town itself was fairly basic and it was the first time a lot of us had encountered beggars on the streets. Along with open drains, rubbish scattered everywhere and missing concrete culvert lids -you didn’t want to walk here in the dark without a good torch because chances are you’d disappear down some dark hole-the town wasn’t that endearing. Almost to scared to look down these holes in case you might see remains of the last victim.
We stayed here for 4 nights giving us the chance to provision and do some sight seeing including the sun bears, orangutan sanctuary and nature walks. We only visited the sun bear park, as we heard he orangutan sanctuary was a bit hit and miss as to whether you got up close and personal with any orangutans. Last year we had visited an orangutan sanctuary located on a wee island in the middle of a lake in Ipoh (Peninsular Malaysia) which was a great experience. Many of the apes were rescued from some awful situations (one was set on fire because he was stealing the village food, you could understand making him stand in the naughty corner, but setting him alight???) and the nice thing was they were not kept in enclosures and had the whole island with an abundance of fruit trees to roam free. It was us humans who were in the viewing cages.
Evenings were spent in the pool at the yacht club, yarning with the other boats. I do have to mention that it was here that Morgan spotted a python that had crawled up our anchor chain, it was still on deck and hadn’t slithered inside…... yet. Morg and Warren managed to put in back in the water with the boat hook, but said snake wasn’t very happy about this. This sparked many snake stories from the other boaties, one boat having returned to find a large python curled up beside their bed.
This was the story from Mikel , and unusually he is a very , very funny German. He told us how he got ze fire extinguisher and shprayed ze shnakes mouth, so it vas frozen and ze schnake could not close hiz mouth, so zen it was easy to take a sling around za schnake and put it back into the water. Zen he putz the schnake back into the sea but I first look to see if she needs a schwimming class, but no she schwimms fine and i let her go.
I have a vision of this poor snake swimming along with a mouth frozen wide open. And possibly a fear of fire extinguishers. Creeps me out to think of a snake hiding in the boat.
The 2 August we were joined by long time sailing friends Des and Julianne from Brisbane, who were keen to experience the river with us. Des is a keen twitcher so was hoping to see some Borneo birdies.
Morg up the mast entering the river.
We entered the River and motored 20mn up the river to our first stop- Abai. Initially it was a strange sensation motoring up a brown river on a yacht. Because of our draught we opted to follow another keeler called Wodan, a steel boat who drew 1.6m and would be able to give us some cautionary soundings . We knew that a trawler with a 3m draught had traveled the same route safely up this river last year. However at the first fork we managed to ground but were thankfully pulled off by Wodan. The river varies in depth enormously, from 2-3m in the shallows to 35 m in some of the deepest parts, but as its a muddy brown there is no bottom in site.
We managed to reach our first anchorage without any further incidents. You are pretty vulnerable in a keel boat in a river. There is limited room for maneuvering, if your anchor snags on the bottom you don’t have the option of diving down to take a look, vis and crocs being the issue here. And if your motor fails, hoisting the sails aint gonna help. So far minimal wildlife has been spotted. A few white egrets and thats it. That night in the anchorage we had torrential rain, so we took advantage of this and had a fresh water deck shower and collected a load of drinking water. No one even thought of the possible repercussions of such rain on a river!
The next day we motored a further 30 nm up to our next base at Sukau. This is where The Rainforest Ecolodge is located and that evening we went for a local, guided boat ride in search of the wildlife. The BIG 5 are, orangutans, proboscus monkeys, crocs, sun bears and pygmy elephants. The proboscus monkeys were in good supply but not much else. The river banks weren’t exactly teaming with wildlife. And as Des so aptly noted ‘I see more wildlife in my backyard at home in Brisbane’, Gotta agree with him, because Ive seen his backyard, cockatoos, bats, butcher birds, kookaburras, king fishers, bush turkeys……Borneos got nothing on Shorncliffe.
After our boat trip we had dinner at the lodge and this is when a few of the rally boats got the call that some of our boats were dragging in the river. It transpired that the heavy rainfall from the night before had also occurred further up the catchment, resulting in a strong current and a shit load of debris rushing downstream. It looked like half a rain forest was floating down the river.
The catamarans were particularly vulnerable as they usually have a bridle system for their anchors which helped in capturing all the wood and debris. The strain on the anchors from this heavy load and strong currents caused 3 cats to pile up on each other, some sustaining significant damage to hulls and others suffering stretched anchor chains.
So the next day was spent clearing anchor chains and bridles of logs and branches and a unanimous vote among the boats saw us motoring back to Abai, which was a fast trip with 3 knots of current with us. We just wanted to get out of this river as fast as possible. There was another tributary off the river at Abai with not nearly so much crap in the water so we were a little happier here and took the opportunity to have a recce of a nearby oxbow lake. We also had a fun dinghy raft up hooning down the river with cold beers.
That is the end of our river journey and the next posy will show some nice underwater shots as we head to a great marine park. Thanks to Des and Joleen for photos and video content!!
Loved the videos and the blog from you Trish. You gave me some belly laughs. Bugger the snakes tho!
great story telling Trish