Octosober 12th: Woke up at 7.45am (yes we are getting lazy!) to a beautiful glassed out ocean. The bay in daylight is very pretty with lots of trees with stunning foliage, on the beach line. There are quite a few yachts anchored here, mostly from the rally. We had a real “English breakfast” Bacon, hash browns, scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes and toast, with Orange juice. Was really nice. Tony and Jordan had a diving competition and a swim. Skyped Lynnie, my sister which was lovely. The internet was not too bad, we have been trying to Skype for ages but the internet hasn’t been good enough. We took the duck into the jetty and walked through the main streets doing a bit of shopping. Lots of sellers and not a lot of buyers. They try all sorts of sales pitches, from “haven’t sold anything all week”, “buy this for good luck”, and then they send the kids to try and sell you stuff while you sit in the café. You do feel for them but you can only buy so many sarongs. Robbie brought a heap of bintang stubbie coolers. I brought some lovely little wooden angels for the Xmas trees for all the females in the family, Natalie, Charlotte, Kristie, Jessie, Lynnie, Ab, Millie, Jenny and one for me too. Janet brought a really cool carved wooden duck in gumboots and we named her “Lovina”. She also brought some lovely Pashmina scarves which we haggled for and eventually paid 40,000 rupiah or about $40 or 23 English pounds. They would have been 39 pounds each in Marks and Spencers! Had a nice pizza and a soda water. Still going strong still on Octsober. Talked to Peter and Heidi who are in Denpasar in a nice Hotel having a pool/swimming day. Heidi commented it’s hard not having a beer. At times I have thought oh a nice cold beer or wine would be nice but I really haven’t missed it. I have been sleeping a lot better lately but not sure if that would be from no alcohol or not.
Octsober 11th: Sailed from Lombok to Lovina Beach, North Bali. The Lombok Straights were really quite rough and choppy but once we rounded the corner of Bali it calmed right down, at one stage we only had 0.9 knots of wind, which is nothing. It was a delightful day and part night on the water. I cooked lamb chops and sweet potato mash with corn on the cob and fresh beans. Tony did the chops on the Bar-B-Q, thank god as I was in a hot sweat. The temperature gauge read over 36 degrees at one stage during the day. No breeze at all. We had to navigate through loads of fishing boats and fads, the radar looked like it had chicken pox! Got safely through and eventually the moon came out about 9:00pm. None of us could believe the number of lights on the land and coastline, we had all presumed North Bali was pretty unpopulated, but that is definitely not the case. We had waypoints from Per and Elizabeth to come in on, and we had no problem and safely dropped anchor at 10:00pm. There was music blaring from 2 disco’s very loudly and Jordan was keen to go and party but we weren’t. Per and Elizabeth called in on their way back and had a whiskey with Tony and Robbie. Janet and I had a lovely cup of tea!
