Sailing the Philippines

And first class transportation

Here I am in Borocay sitting in an Italian restaurant right on the beach with a view over the passing foot traffic and the most incredible powdery white sand beach in probably the whole of Asia.  Borocay has been a resort area of choice for many years for people around the world.  I call it Mexico on steroids!  Although very beautiful it is busy.  In the anchorage the first speed boats go by at 0600hrs and don’t stop until 1830hrs.  There are all sorts of boats delivering people to the different resorts, taking people out on banana boat and para gliding rides, boats going out diving and just place speed boats because for some strange reason people seem to like roaring along in a very powerful speedboat being bounced and jostled around and salt spray flying.  The one saving grace are the paraws, the sailing bankhas.

There must be over 100 paraws taking people out for day rides and sunset cruises.  They are an amazing sailing craft and the precursor to what are now being used in the Americas Cup to be held in San Francisco (see link for some amazing video footage of the new America’s Cup boats). It’s the most wonderful thing to see in the mid evening hours seeing the paraws sailing home; no lights, light winds and they surround the boat in the evening light drifting by like ghosts.  Fine if you’re at anchor but if you’re doing night sailing in the Philippines something to watch out for.  One unlucky cruising boat did run over a paraw when they were sailing at night, the wife taking the winch handle to a persons hands on the rail of their boat not realizing she had just run over and sank a paraw.  Needless to say they had to take the man to hospital with two broken hands and pay for the health care costs as well as a new paraw!

So where have we been and what have we been doing?  Without going into long drawn out stories our sailing has taken us to Cebu, Carmen, Malapusca, Gigantes, Culasi and finally now Borocay.  We’re stopping here to renew our visas before sailing on to Palawan where we hope to meet some friends flying in from Canada.  We’re only hoping the weather improves a little as we’ve been haing strong winds, lots of rain all interspersed with some very hot and humid days.  Ah well, what’s new.