Back on the water after 2.5 months

Date: Nov 13, 2016

Trip #20
Weather: Cloudy, then threatening, then clear   
Waters: Slightly choppy, especially off the SLNG terminal
On board: C and A  
New gear on board: DJI Mavic Pro drone

Litle Wanderer sits at the mouth of the Pulau Hantu lagoon at low tide. 
The deep brown patches are seaweed.
Mainland Singapore to the north of this. Photo by the new Mavic drone. 

That's the newspoint of this post, folks! It's a photo we've been wanting for a long time, and now that we've got it, it runs first, ahead of the preliminaries!

Now, the preliminaries: Talk of a long break from boating. It wasn't for the want of trying. Some weeks, we had stuff going on on Saturday, our designated boating day; other weeks, the weather screwed it up for us. Or the tides did.

With J1 still to return from Sydney and J2 in Milan on holiday, it was just the old fogies today. We were looking to fly C's new toy off the boat and getting aerial shots of Little Wanderer sitting amid the blue.

We arrived at the mouth of Pulau Hantu's lagoon to find it awash in seaweed. The tide was very low but just starting to turn. It was just calf deep even at the breakwater, so we cut the engine and floated there.

Fairly clear water. Pulau Bukom in the background. 

Seems to be the sargassum?

A short video of C putting the drone into take-off from the swim platform of the boat:

The skies turned dark as we ended the flight.

We waited it out. There was a thin drizzle, then the skies brightened. We headed for home base, and there, Raffles Marina laid out yet another one of its spectacular sunsets for us. We berthed the boat and C hurriedly assembled the drone again and got this from the dock:

It was so picturesque that a wedding couple were having a photo shoot there.

This was taken a few minutes before the pic above. C at left
at the controls of the drone, and A washing out the icebox.

This was Little Wanderer's 20th outing, and what a great day it was.