Octsober 23rd & 24th: Day 23 of Octsober and still going strong! Am enjoying my soda waters and lime, or Tonic and fresh limes – so glad we have an icemaker on board, well it’s integrated in our freezer and we both think it’s the best thing. Although our water maker has died (again) we are so pleased we brought a Nordhavn, it has been so reliable and has not let us down. We have done a lot of miles and hours with this engine running non-stop for days and she never misses a beat. Quite amazing really to me anyway with my “non-technical” brain. In this warm climate the boat does get warm after a long passage but the last few days we have just shut all the windows, run the generator and turned on all 5 air conditioners and it really cools down fast.
So, we departed Kumai at 8:00am for our 2 days and 2 nights passage, the longest trip we have had since leaving Australia. Bit of a shock to the system I must say. We never sleep much on the first night anyway but we didn’t sleep much on the 2nd night either. I slept more than Robbie which is unusual but there were a lot of fishing boats the first night, and large ships and also a few of the tugs and barges which looked like islands. At one stage the A.I.S. screen looked really scary. We took a photo, we have never seen it this congested before. It’s so hard to tell how far away lights are when you see them in the night. Thank god for the radar, it works really well, picks up the small fishing craft and even the fishing F.A.D.’s when we zoom into 1.5 klm’s and of course always picks up the bigger vessels.
It was very windy and choppy coming across the big bay coming out of Kumai but settled down after a few hours, into an annoying swell on our back quarter. Pretty boring passage until the 2nd night when it suddenly became very unboring with a lot of lightning, thunder and rain squalls. The rain squalls actually show up on our radar, looking like land. Amazing and you can see them moving. We didn’t end up getting any rain but the lightning and thunder got close enough that we unplugged our main navigation laptop and this laptop and the iPad and put them in the microwave! Not sure if that’s the right thing to do or not, but other yachties have told us that they are safe in there in case of a lightning strike. It’s the first time we have had lightning since on the boat and it wasn’t a real good feeling I can tell you! Will have to do a bit of research on this for future.
We arrived into our anchorage on Belitung Island at 10:00am, with Oda and Stormvogel not far behind us. There were already a few rally boats anchored. It’s a very pretty bay with some really interesting rock formations (which are lit up with coloured lights at night), the water is really clear and the beach white sand. We were exhausted so had showers and hit the bed for some much needed sleep. We had a good few hours but decided not to go into shore so had a quiet night – watched a movie and in bed by 7:00pm
Octsober 26th: Was able to Skype Gill, Robbie’s sister who is bringing Robbie’s Mum over to Malaysia to stay with us for 10 days in January, very exciting news. Also able to Skype Nat and the grandkids is so good to see their smiling faces and Charlotte is saying a few words now. Ethan has grown so much since we left and as always he never sits still. Poor Nat has her hands full with those two munchkins. Wish we were there to help her more often. Will have some making up to do when we do go home! More exciting news, we also heard this week that Robbie’s eldest son, Scott and his wife Sarah are expecting their first child, this will Grandchild no 3 for us.
We went into shore for a meeting with Raymond at 9:00am this was pretty brief and we were soon back on the boat. The wind got up and it became very choppy and roly and quite uncomfortable. I was trying to clean the inside of the boat but actually felt quite queasy it was so roly. Ended up having a read and updating the website. Somebody else slept!
We are going into shore for dinner to a “Resto” – hopefully it’s not the one that Peter and Heidi had lunch at where after lunch they saw in the kitchen a cat licking the pot and pans – YUK. There are a lot of cats in Indonesia – not many dogs – that’s scary when you think about it. Anyway the cats all have a very short stubby tail and are mostly skin and bone. I picked a little kitten up off the middle of the road in Kumai and it broke my heart to see how skinny it was, all I could feel were bones.
