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Sunday, February 14, 2010

Feb. 08, 2010-Tanjung Ruh

wingssail images-fredrick roswold
The Sentinels, Tanjung Ruh

Once in a while you stumble into an out-of-the way place which stuns you with its enchanting beauty, protection, and peace. Maybe that is why we often venture off the beaten path; to search for that treasure of a place that maybe nobody knows about.

Tanjung Ruh on Langkawi Island is not exactly a secret; tourists come here by the boatload, but it is not in the guide book and there is no chart of it. However Trevor from Been a Long told us about it and said it was good. His wife Joan gave us a bit of a mud map that they’d made. On that basis we decided to take a look but neither of us were convinced we would either find a way into Tanjung Ruh or that we’d find anything we liked once we got inside.

We did both.

Arriving in the afternoon in a light westerly we anchored Wings in the deep water at the entrance to Tanjung Ruh, a beautiful spot in its own right and we’d have been happy to spend the night there, but, being adventurous, we piled into the Zodiac, took the hand-held GPS, a lead line and a notebook and set out to find a channel. After an hour of tossing the lead and yelling “Mark Twain” over and over we finally found a path which thought we could follow with the big boat. It zigged and zagged across the flats and the depths went from 40ft to 11ft and back a few times but it seemed passable. We entered it into the charting system on Wings’ navigation computer and weighed anchor.

The adventure began: motoring slowly we dared to enter into Tanjung Ruh. Judy was on the charting system calling the turns and I was on the helm nosing Wings ever forward. It was touch and go (however we did not actually touch, but it was close and we did go). Once we got inside and passed between a sand spit on the right and the rock on the left with the words “SLOW” painted on it in white block letters, we were in. A new world opened up for us.

Tanjung Ruh, is a perfect shelter and even with a number of tour boats going too and fro it is a quiet basin of peace and protection; a calm lake surrounded by a protecting ring of mountains which in the day are simply green hills but at night the tall escarpments stand up against the starry sky like dark sentinels. As we sat in our deck chairs that night and looked at the stars and the silhouettes of those nearby mountains we felt safe and protected here; nothing can reach us.

Here we can sleep in peace.

Click here to see more photos of Tanjung Ruh

Click here to see the chart we made.

Click here to see the log book pages of our sailing trips in Febuary 2010

SV Wings, Tanjung Ruh, Langkawi, Malaysia

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