Beautiful pinisi
It was VERY lucky we weren’t out at sea as we would have suddenly lost satellite tracking, messaging, phone calls and most importantly, weather prediction information. When I realized that my subscription had been cancelled, I called Predict Wind and they blamed it on PayPal, the lying basteds.
Anyway, it was good to be up and running once again. We headed off in hot glassy calm conditions, weaving our way through all the beautiful pinisi's in the harbour, making our way out through the northern passage on our way to Pulau Sabibi. It was only a 20 nm (3 hour) passage and for the first two hours there was no wind at all, but in the last hour the wind sprang up to 19 knots right on the nose and the sea got quite rough.
When we arrived at Pulau Sabibi around 12:25, the Navionics charts showed no information of the reef we were about to enter and all I had to go by was Offline maps that I had down loaded onto my phone before leaving Labuan Bajo this morning. It was hard to see the satellite imagery on my phone in the strong sunlight and the wind was howling and blowing us all over the place and the waves were tossing us about. I was terrified of hitting the reef in these conditions, but I had to remain calm and have faith in my instruments.
With full confidence in the satellite imagery on my phone, I slowly started to make my way into the small channel between the dangerous coral reefs while watching the sonar like a hawk. Without any drama we managed to find a small sandy patch in 5-6 meters and we dropped the anchor. I waited for maybe 20 minutes to ensure the anchor was holding in the 20+-knots of wind, before jumping over the side to check out the anchor and to make sure our swing radius was clear of any shallow bombies.
Pulau Sabibi
All was fine and I continued on with a lovely snorkel for about a kilometer, and then turned and snorkelled about the same distance into the Island. The coral was pretty good, but not too many fish about. I large remora swam up to me and I spent a minute or two looking around to see what it came off, but he rejected me and went back to sitting on the bottom.
I walked a long way along the beach on the Island looking at all the drift wood and rubbish while keeping an eye out for monkeys, but saw none, then snorkelled all the way back out to the boat. On the way back to the boat I picked up a giant clam to cook as an entree before tonight's dinner.
giant clam for tonight's entree
Back at the boat, I let out another 10 meters of anchor scope just to be sure. Later, after a lovely shower, I messed about trying to get OpenCPN and a USB GPS to work. This was my GPS fixed, satellite imagery program used for navigation. I haven’t used it for the past few years, so I have to teach myself how to use it all over again as it’s quite complicated, while Luke had another go at making Beef rendang. After dinner we prepared the boat for tomorrows night passage and as both of us were extremely tired, we went to be early.
Track Sirocco’s progress
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