Sailing Remote Palawan, Philippines: Adventures on the Sulu Sea!

“I don’t know if this is for real,” Ryan starts. “The Danish guy still hasn’t asked for any money for his boat.”

The six of us laugh, to cover the possibility of our dream breaking. 

“At least we’ll be in the Philippines, and it’s cheap and beautiful,” Sam chimes in.

“I’m just saying, if this turns out weird, I warned you guys.”

Ahem.

“Look at that one!”

Ryan zooms in on one of hundreds of islands. A emerald speck emerges, both sides curved in identical coves of white sand, the shallows ringed in surreal, bright turquoise. 

“Brah…!”

Even for the kids raised on Maui, the place is jaw dropping.

The thing is–out of the six of us, only Ryan can sail.

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll learn to tie bowlins!” We laugh and promise Ryan.

Hopefully it’s not a problem.

There’s me, my husband Sam, my 18 year old stepson Jai, our 5 year old Anika, Cap’n Ryan, and his 10 year old son Zeb, all flying halfway around the world to jump on a stranger’s boat in a remote archipelago of the Philippines: Palawan. What could go wrong?

On a map this trail of islands looks like it’s trying to escape westward from the rest of the country’s eastern swing. Palawan is the old land bridge to Borneo, and we’re aiming for a group of gorgeous islands near its border. “Isn’t that area full of pirates? And salt water crocodiles?” My friend asks after googling it. “It’s close to all that,” I say, “but not quite in it,” hoping to reassure her. Still, I learn to say help among other choice words in Tagalog. 

Coron Town

After days of flights, hotels, trains, buses, and taxis from Maui, I’m amazed that the mysterious Danish’s guy’s 27 ft monohull is real. But her engine has a squeaking belt and a warning light on. And those aren’t the biggest problems. It’s the anchor.

“This thing…!” Ryan chuckles in disbelief. “It looks like 12 pounds! If we’re anchored somewhere at night and the wind comes up…Uh. I’m taking this thing to town to get weighed.”

There are no tools that we can find, no spare parts.

“Another thing.” Ryan leans closer. “I looked over the papers–this boat is registered to some lady in Malaysia.”

We stare at Ryan.

“What about the Danish guy?”

“Yeah, I asked him about it, and he just went, ‘oh, if you get stopped by the Coast Guard, have them call me.’ I didn’t know what to say!”

In spite of everything, Ryan decides we can manage. The jib is usable and the engine works, even if the margin for error without parts and tools is…well.

Plus, we’re anxious to get into the wild landscape and out of Coron, where open sewers run along the sidewalk, and ribcage-skinny cats with huge balls crawl over trash heaps. Muslim women in hijabs stare at me from souvenir shops unsmiling, holding out tubes of sunscreen for sale. After a while, we find a working ATM, a water shop to fill our big plastic containers, sacks of rice from neighboring Mindanao, plenty of diesel, pumpkins, ginger, booze, noddles, cookies.

After two days in Coron, walking, shopping, rickshawing and making supply runs in the dingy over to the boat, Sam stops in the middle of unloading supplies and squints at the shoreline.

“What if that’s…a hotel?” To stay over here until we set sail would be a dream. The boat is moored a few minutes from Coron town, on the other side of a quiet island and a world apart. On the island, colorful flags flap and whitewashed buildings are perched up the hillside. I wonder if it’s just a rich person’s house. The mangroves end at a skinny ribbon of beach and a small pier.

We take the dingy and find Discovery Island Resort, inaccessible by road and removed from the noise and squalor of Coron town, where Ryan catches Dengue fever and ends up in a Filipino hospital, near death. But anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

We make the decision to leave our grungy Coron hotel within minutes of stepping foot on the Discovery Island. Still, the owner warns of box jellyfish and sea serpents. “We can motor you out to deeper currents to swim,” she promises, and I raise my eyebrows. But when the employees’ backs are turned, Jai just swims back to the boat to hang with Zeb and Ryan, and we live it up at Discovery Island.

As we finish prepping for our voyage to the wild islands of Balabac near Borneo, it’s still dry season. Wildfires are raging everywhere, like this one that springs up after dark, snaking down a distant road.

“Mama, is that lava!?”

At Discovery Island I’m relieved to feel clean and safe again, chowing curry and playing pool at the hotel’s mangrove-side restaurant.

Other boat people flow through for food and supplies, and I tap them for local knowledge.

“Download this app–people leave notes on different anchorages,” one said.

“Go west out of here, NOT east. The other way is full of reef,” advised another.

“Hope you got plenty diesel,” a grizzled old sailor snorted, after hearing our plan.

“Why?” I asked, but he just smiled, tipped the last of his beer, and got up.

 

Dagan comes in the next morning, and Sam is relieved by his Navy knowledge and 

standards. (A few nights before, the six of us nearly capsized in the overloaded dingy at sunset, not quite understanding the reefs and buoys out here. Unlike Maui, where reef is found close to shore and deep water = relative safety, in the Philippines, shallow and even dry reef, can be anywhere. As it got dark we, uh, found some.)

Anyway. Dagan’s agreed to be Ryan’s fellow captain on the journey–he’ll get some fun content for his YouTube channel, share in the responsibilities, and have an adventure. Since the rest of us can barely tie a bowline and all. Right away, though, the tension starts.

SAILING PALAWAN

Well. We motor out of Discovery Island Bay for the first time with an optimistic amount of jib sail, and thread through our first island channel. 

“This is not a time to be casting line, my man,” Dagan corrects Zeb, Ryan’s 10 year old son who’s quietly rigging up his fishing pole as we thread reef and rocks, dancing with boats who don’t observe the international “pass on the port side” rule.

“If we turn hard suddenly and that gets caught in the prop, we’re in deep.”

And later–“dude! What did I tell you?”

We run out of beer in a single day.

Dagan’s hat says Master Helmsman and below his pirate tattoos, a silver ring claims, “NAVY.”

That first day he says a lot of things but the one I will never forget is this,

“Bro, I can parallel park an aircraft carrier.”

Well, ok then.

Here’s Dagan after plucking  a giant clam from the ocean floor. 

As we approach our first proposed anchorage site, it looks like Thailand met Kaua’i and had a baby, and happy noises erupt from the boat.

We’re far enough from Coron that the day trippers and party boats have vanished. We pass no one except a few palm-thatch fishing huts. 

We come around to Calais Point, on the southern tip of the island. Nat King Cole croons on the stereo, the water sparkles, and I feel like I’m in a dream.

We snorkel in crystal clear bathwater and Dagan catches a fish to add to dinner. Spirits are still high.

You know why you haven’t heard of other people sailing in the southern Philippines? Why the old sailor laughed at our plans? Why Ryan met Dagan on a sailing-in-the-Philippines forum as the only other recent post? 

There’s almost no wind.

Yeah. At 10 degrees north, it’s a rhino’s hair away from the doldrums, making it clear we’re not gonna make it anywhere near  Balabac. Still, our realistic reach includes plenty of beautiful, unknown islands of the Sulu Sea–which has been called “one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world since the pre-colonial era.”* 

Pirates attacks and kidnappings are rare outside what are now called the “red zones,” but they do happen sometimes. We’re still 600 miles away from the Sulu Sea’s definite red zone–about the distance from San Francisco to Portland. Comforting, right?

But anyway. Most of the time, it feels serene and the water is sheet glass. Ryan and Zeb nap in the unused mainsail as we motor, burning through our diesel.

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The exception to this calmness being, of course, the afternoons.

As a good thunderstorm whips up at the predictable hour of 3pm, we bellow, “Riders on the Storm! Da da-da da-da…” and dart around tightening the jib, at last making good headway! Did you know you can calculate a boat’s maximum speed by its length?

1.34 X the square root of its waterline = top speed.

On our boat, 1.34 X 5.19 = about a whopping 6knots/hour.

(With a nautical name like Marina, I feel it’s important to know these things.) 

That first night, it’s all glittering stars. We pull the plastic mats off the seating areas and lay them over the abovedecks, while lightening flashes at the edges of the sky. I peer down, stunned to see bioluminescence stirring under the boat, and fall asleep with the gentle rocking. It’s heaven.

In the morning, we set off for the next deserted island, and the journey is a freaking dream come true. Still, we know the monsoon could arrive any day now and turn our fun little afternoon storms into all-day torrential rain.

BOAT LIFE

Meanwhile, things on board are getting more…irritating. The produce I bought in Coron town has either been eaten or gone soft, circled by clouds of gnats, and goes overboard.

The kids leave their stuff out everywhere. A pair of shorts blows away. Zeb casts line again when we’re underway without telling anyone.

“BRO! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”

“Hey,” Ryan hisses, “maybe you can be a little more gentle with my son. He’s obsessed with fishing.”

“Hey man, I get it. You’re the kind, accommodating Dad. But out here, one mistake can turn into five real quick and–”

BOOM! Cracks thunder. 

The guys stare at each other.

“Reef! Reef!” Jai shouts, pointing starboard.

That night, I’m woken up by rain tapping my face and I ignore it as long as possible, hoping it’ll shift or disappear, but it only falls harder. Other people are bolting upright. Soon we’re all tripping over each other in the dark, hustling our blankets and pillows into the stuffy, baking cabin, on the floor and benches. Sweating and steaming to the sound of snoring and the smell of unwashed bodies. Did I mention it’s like 90 degrees at night? It’s hard to wear clothes.

Skip ahead to afternoon. Motoring up to Ditaytayan, the boys take the dingy around, jumping off in places to assess the bottom. We’re committed to not crushing coral with our anchor, but that leaves very little options around here.

“There’s nowhere, man,” Dagan yells up at Ryan, holding the tiller. It’s all bombers!” (Huge coral heads)

At last, we anchor in a tiny patch of sand with lots of sweating and shouting. My hands are brown-orange from the rusty anchor chain that has to be raised and lowered by hand–no fancy automatic windlass on this old girl.

By the next day, I know things are…iffy. As a crew, we’ve got sunburns and rashes, no fresh produce or booze, and the tiller, which steers the boat, is getting looser by the day. Still, each destination is a thrilling quest and we can’t quit. 

REMOTE PALAWAN

We’re headed for a spot on the map that’s tucked deep behind endless islands, shallow in gorgeous blues and maybe the farthest from civilization so far. There are no comments about this area in our nautical, anchorage-finding apps. Maybe that should be concerning. But Dagan is sure it looks protected and with the monsoon arriving any day now, protection is appealing. We motor deeper, tighter, steering around island after island, and even though this area looks empty we find it’s teeming with aquaculture. 

“Fish farm, starboard!”

The boat tilts, sets a new course.

“Thank you!”

Ryan and Jai have climbed the mast to see the hazards better. 

Locals have lines in the water for a hundred reasons, and each one could damage or destroy our propeller. Knowing we have no tools or spare parts, it ups the ante a bit.

“Seaweed farm, dead ahead!”

See all that unmarked stuff just above the water? 

“REEF!”

“I see it man, thank you,” Dagan squints into the sun, making a hard turn to avoid a patch of bright blue water.

“Pearl farm. Shit. Hold on, you guys.”

The water ahead is getting suuuuuper light blue.

“Fishermen, port!”

At last, we veer around a craggy island and idle in in a sandy patch, facing another island. It’s almost evening. Animal coos and cries reverberate from the forest above the mangroves. I feel like I’m in National Geographic.

Below, it’s so calm the water is like silk.

“How’s it look?” We yell at Jai when he comes up for air.

“Perfect.” We sigh in relief. 

But as the sun gets lower we squint at what wasn’t there before, emerging in the new moon, extra-low tide.

“Oh lord.”

“What is that!?”

“Pray to God there’s no wind tonight,” Dagan mumbles. “This is fuckin crazy.”

It’s safer to stay put in this draining bathtub than to try and move anywhere in the dark.

I look at the dry reef, imagining how little it would take to get blown fifty feet. 

The wind comes up a little, rippling the water, and I start to sweat.

But we make it out the next morning, the boat in one piece. A moment of quiet reflects how close of a call that whole thing was. Any serious wind and our protected haven would’ve been a mine field between dry reef and islands on three sides.

But despite our luck and gorgeous surroundings, the general mood continues to sour.

“The mainsail is in tatters,” Dagan shakes his head after unfurling it to check it out.

“Good thing we don’t have enough wind to need it!”

No one laughs.

But the next island is so beautiful it’s a welcome distraction. The dingy makes it over the reef without scratching bottom, to this, again uninhabited, beach. Dagan points out a Filipino elder’s seasonal fishing shack ducked into the shadows at one end. Other than that, it’s screeching jungle sounds, coconuts, and sand.

MALCAPUYA

The next morning is Anika’s birthday and we’re motor-sailing to our next anchorage. Zeb and Ryan are towing themselves behind the boat through deep water, twisting and laughing on the lines trailing from the stern.

“What’s over there?” Sam nods to a island with a handful of boats anchored just offshore as we pass.

“Malcapuya,” Dagan answers, still looking straight ahead. “Looks like drinks, snacks, little resort kinda thing.”

Sam and I eye each other, and soon we’re doing an about-face towards the little island in hopes of finding some fun to celebrate Anika.

Sure enough, before long we’re chowing banana pancakes, sucking down cold beer and coconuts and watching little boys jump off wooden boats in the crystal clear water. We pass the rest of the afternoon splashing, drinking, laughing alongside the smiling locals.

But back on board, there’s a new problem.

“Uh, guys…when did this stop blowing?”

Ryan has a hand over one of the two engine exhaust holes at the stern.

By afternoon, it’s almost a mutiny.

“We’ve got a janky anchor, a tiller so loose it could snap,” Dagan counts on his fingers. “A squeaking drive belt on the engine–and if it snaps, where we gonna get a new one?”

No one answers. There isn’t an answer, really. Maybe we’d make one with a piece of ripped clothing? We’d be screwed.

“And now the engine isn’t expelling half of its hot air. We don’t even know the extent of what’s going on down there. No way are we going further south, further away from any villages with supplies, from any kind of help AT ALL.”

It’s a standoff.

Some want to continue on, some want to call it quits.

Safety, that prude, wins in the end. Where is their sense of adventure?

The sound of defeat is quiet, motoring back towards Coron, the last place any of us wants to be. It’ll take two non-stop days to get there.

For our anchorage tonight, I’ve found on patch of sand by satelight, a place we passed on the way to Calais Point on that first day. It looks like the only place to anchor on that whole west side of the island, still many hours away. Again, no one has noted this place on the nautical apps.

At first sight, there’s happy shouting and laughing. It’s a rare circle of sand alright, and the color of the water is so sexy you could lick it. A school of baby octupus swim by as we work to set the anchor by hand. 

Once the anchor is set, I swim-tow Anika to the tiny beach on the island with an inflatable mattress, while the rest snorkel in through channels in the reef.

“LOOK!” Zeb runs up to us, arms full of shells as big as his hands.

Anika shrieks and they run off.

The thin shoreline is jammed with shells like I’ve never seen before. After an afternoon of collecting and poking in and out of caves and coves, I sleep like a rock above deck, gently swaying in our beautiful anchorage.

Until I don’t.

Waking up to pee, a sense of dread spreads as I notice Ryan’s silhouette, sitting straight up.

He senses me, and turns. “I haven’t slept all night. This anchorage makes me nervous,” he whispers.  “I think we’re drifting.”

I wish I could rewind and go back to sleep, make this all go away.

Did we not sink the anchor deep enough? Did the tides shift, the wind?

“I’m gonna go sit by the tiller, just to be ready.”

It’s so dark, I can’t tell if we’re still in the sandy circle, or if we’re indeed drifting over coral.

Sam hears us talking and sighs, going below decks to wake up Dagan.

“I think the anchor’s dragging, man.”

He bolts upright. “What?”

It’s 2AM.

Fire drill.

EVERYTHING has to be put away by headlamp, the soaked wads of bathing suits and clothes, dirty bowls, flippers, masks, cups, fishing poles, the careless afternoon’s joy.

“We’re ten feet from the reef!” Dagan screams, his flashlight beam bouncing over the water.

“Marina, starter fluid on the engine,” Ryan hisses and tosses me the little bottle. I tear into his berth, pulling the cover off the engine and tipping the bottle over the air filter.

Vrrrrroooom!

“HURRY!”

I hear Jai heaving the rusted chain up, one heavy handful at a time, until it goes quiet.

“It’s stuck!”

“Jesus.”

Someone makes Ryan coffee. 

By 2:30AM, the anchor is free again and we’re motoring into deeper water, but of course the buoys marking reefs don’t have lights so we can’t be sure.

“Damn!” We narrowly miss a fishing boat with no lights, zooming past.

My heart hammers in my chest.

“So now…”

“Now we motor out here till daylight.”

“Oh.”

NOT the way I imagined our final night on the boat.

“Hey, that’s the St. Francis Xavier. The ferry I’m going home on,” mumbles Dagan, nodding at the huge passenger ferry that Filipinos use for travel: cheap and consistent in its slow arc around the Philippines every week.

“Here on Monday, home in five days,” he sighs. 

Ryan still hasn’t slept as dawn breaks and we pull up to our old mooring at Discovery Island. Ryan and Zeb are planning to fix the boat’s issues and continue on, and Dagan is done with us and our broke-down boat, heading for the ferry home. But me, Sam, Jai and Anika have make it further south to catch our flight out of Puerto Princesa in a few days. It’s not like we can just drive or take a bus though.

After a day of scrubbing, cleaning, tossing, and resupplying the water and fuel, we say our goodbyes, exchange money, contacts and grumbles, apologies and gratitudes.

Weird thing is, the giant St. Francis ferry is still in the same spot as we saw her at 3AM. Her side is now full of smaller boats, like kittens suckling a mother. I don’t see the headlines till later–how she broke down, dropped anchor and drifted onto the reef with 1400 passengers aboard.* That same reef that rises out of deep water and nearly wrecked us our first evening in the dingy.

El NIDO

Still, we have to keep moving, so we board a different ferry (with a few extra prayers!) and get off into a craggy, gorgeous land,

holing up at a place called Coconuts, taking long showers and walking on wobbly sea legs. El Nido’s landscape is breathtaking, and the curries and smoothies and local dishes at Coconuts makes me want to stay for days. 

But we have to keep moving, again, to our last stop: Sabang. It’s a brand-new outpost of the Marriott, which I guess they thought is bound to blow up at some point, since the nearby subterranean river flowing through bat-choked caves recently got christened “the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

THE SUBTERRANEAN RIVER, SABANG

You get off at this cove full of multicolored butterflies, hike through a jungle path and board canoes on this neon green water at the river-cave’s entrance.

The best part for me is seeing hundreds of bats. The whole river tour is cool, but more touristy than I like. To avoid the crowds, get the first boat at 8am!

OCEAN ZIPLINE

On the way back, we opt to get dropped off on a deserted beach for the $7 zipline across a beautiful bay. Climbing the hillside to the jump-off, I’m stunned that Anika is excited and not scared, even as we stand on the platform getting hooked in.

As we’re pushed off, my stomach flutters and my brain reminds me, “this is a third world zipline!!” And later when I snorkle under it in the bay, I see the old cable, laid to rest across the sand bottom. Glad we weren’t riding when version 1.0 came down.

Anika shrieks with joy as we fly over the clear water, and it’s a beautiful sight I want to burn in my mind. On the 20 minute walk back to the hotel, we jump back in the ocean over and over, passing swimming lizards and a bamboo raft ferrying people across a rust-orange mangrove river.

SABANG

Just driving out to here from Puerto Princesa is like entering the movie Avatar. Huge, jagged limestone cliffs, jungle growing from every crack and ledge. And every afternoon at 3pm the cracks of thunder are so loud I scream. Cue giant raindrops.

But the beach is clean, warm, the people friendly, the mountains above mystical. How is it so empty of tourists, we wonder?

Even the hotel seems empty. At their Kid’s Club, there is one other kid for Anika to play with.

And the place is full of moths and butterflies of every color. This were collected in less than two minutes from the paths.

The hotel’s restaurant serves tikka masala pizza, lemon cucumber cooler, (my favorite!) and purple ube bread with cashew butter. Delicious. The Philippines is full of cashews trees.

But after a few days of living the high life at the Marriott it’s time to get to the airport in Puerto Princesa, bound for Korea and the last leg of our adventure.

At the airport, our flight is delayed for hours, but none of the waiting passengers seem agitated. Soon I realize the cause of the delay: the monsoon has finally arrived.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, both Dagan and Ryan have contracted dengue fever, the “bone breaking disease” in Coron. Dagan holes up in a hostel for days, sweating and hurting, while Ryan ends up in a hospital, rethinking the future of he and Zeb’s tropical adventures. It’s a wake up call–these risky journeys are all fun and games, until they’re not. Still, I can’t help smiling at Hellen Keller’s version: “Life is a daring adventure, or nothing.”

 

References

* Sulu Sea piracy according to sailors the Wynns: https://www.gonewiththewynns.com/pirate-territory-midnight-boarding/#:~:text=The%20Sulu%20Sea%20has%20been,areas%20known%20as%20Red%20Zones.

* The St. Francis Xavier’s oopsie onto the reef: https://www.pressreader.com/philippines/daily-tribune-philippines/20240610/282007562543866?srsltid=AfmBOorDwR5UMiOMkkgnUzqyyX_ETsQOjabkpJIqbgmmLv-sVEEt5vax