Hello from Bali! We arrived Tuesday, 1:00 pm after 6 days of sailing from Dampier. Great to be here. Phil went to shore to deal with the clearing in procedures, where he was taken by motorbike around to all the officials...harbourmaster, navy, customs, immigration and quarantine. It took 4 hours! He also managed to get a local phone card so we can use the internet.
Chris and I stayed on Basanti and did some post passage cleaning and organizing and launched the dinghy.
Six days at sea...what is it like? Well, as a bear on my first ocean passage, I was a little apprehensive with these two. We were extremely fortunate to have idyllic conditions...maybe a couple of knots more wind would have been nice at times, but we aren't going to complain. When the engine runs we make water out of the beautiful clean ocean so we were all able to enjoy our showers at the end of the day.
Through the nights Phil and Chris did two hour watches. When we had to jibe or when anyone had to leave the cockpit and go forward on the boat, both of them were awake. Mostly it was pretty peaceful and moonlit...the person on watch kept an eye out for ships with the AIS (what a Godsend) and made any necessary adjustments to sails or our course. Bears have no understanding whatsoever about sailing so it seemed best if I stayed in my bunk. During the day we prepared meals and did a few jobs. Phil was busy making a pen/pencil holder for the chart table and when he was drilling away on the block of wood it was so incongruous with our location in the middle of the ocean. Floors got scrubbed, little items were repaired and we read about our destination as well as a number of novels.
Food was great on board. There were no sea sickness issues to deal with, so cooking was fun. We had beautiful fresh Coral Trout one day, and some steaks with Spanish rice and refried beans another day. A couple of curries were made and a chicken stir fry rounded out the evening meals. Phil made pancakes a few times and for snacks we enjoyed his rum fruit cake...yum.
We saw so many whales in the first day!! Sometimes they were just swimming along or resting on the surface, other times they were slapping the surface with fins or doing other odd whale things. About 2 days out of Bali a huge pod of dolphins raced over to us (leaping through the air) and swam at our bow for about 20 minutes...great fun to watch.
Finally, on the 6th morning, when the sun came up we could see land ahead. We were pretty close then...about 25 miles out, but it seemed to take forever to do those last miles because of the very strong currents that run south through the Lombok Strait.
Chris and Phil have raced over to shore in search of Bintang. I'm supposed to write the blog and I'll post a few photos when they return with the camera.
PS. Goodness me...when I logged into the computer to do the blog, everything was in Indonesian!!
No comments:
Post a Comment