October 1st: Departed at 6:30am and it’s a 30 nautical mile run to Medana Bay Marina. Perfect Southern Star weather, little wind and calm seas. We had a pod of dolphins playing on the bow for a while, they are so cool and just bring a smile to your face every time. We saw lots of fishing fads – small floating structures that the locals make that the fish hang around. We had 3 rods out again and saw quite a few birds working bait fish but no luck for us again today. We arrived at the Marina at 1:30pm and it is a lovely little reef fringed bay with a marina that holds about 8 boats in berths and about 10 moorings and room for a couple to anchor. There are quite a few of the rally boats already here and also the kiwi Yacht Wairama that is not in the rally followed us in.
We had a meal in the café and it was really nice, Nasi Goreng chicken, and French fries. The diet will start tomorrow. No alcohol for Heidi or I so we had a couple of mock tails, I had a mickey mouse which is really just an ice cream sundae, coke with ice cream. I haven’t had one of those since the kids were little (20 years?) and Heidi had a pink something. It was nice for a change.
Back to the boat to try and sort out some banking, the internet is VERY slow and keeps dropping out. Robbie ordered 1500 litres of diesel at 10,000 rupiah per litre so had to go and draw out some more cash as we had to pay up front. ARRRRH the ATM wouldn’t work with our cards for cheque account so tried the credit option and that worked. Frantically trying to transfer the funds on the internet banking last night and couldn’t get any of the 3 internet options we had to work. We have a dongle, Robbie’s phone and the Marina has free Wi-Fi. Very frustrating but eventually after the lovely Lil came over with her phone and iPad for me to use, our dongle decided to work.
Was lovely to see Meika, from Mediterraneo, she popped in while we were trying to count the 15 million rupiah for the fuel. Oh that was the other thing the ATM spat out 50,000 notes instead of the normal 100,000 notes so we had a huge wad of notes. Plus Robbie had withdrawn 1.6 million and there was only 1.5 million in the wad so we lost 100,000 somewhere along the way. Bit of a stressful event this diesel business and that’s before we even go through the exercise of tipping 1500 litres into the boat out of 20 litre containers!!! We will certainly appreciate the civilisation of a fuel tanker next time we use one!
We were pretty tired so skipped the sundowners in the Marina bar watched another episode of Rome, only have a couple left. It’s very raunchy and gory in parts but we are quite enjoying it and look forward to it each night.
My first Octsober day done, (no alcohol for the month of October) and I didn’t even miss it. 1 down and 29 to go.
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