I was woken once again around 04:30 with a low battery voltage alarm. The batteries were at the end of their life and were not lasting through the night. I was too tired to care, so I just shut off all the DC circuit breakers and the inverter, and then went back to sleep, thinking I will deal with it in the morning.
I got up at 06:30 and the first thing I did was to check the freezers and they were still frozen, so after having a coffee, cup noodles and downloading the weather, we headed off at 08:10 on the short passage (33nm / 5.2h) to Kroko Atoll on the north east tip of Adonara Island.
Not long after we left Tanjung Gedong, it started blowing 16 - 20 knots right on the nose all the way and the sea was quite rough. When we arrived at Kroko Atoll it was rather calm and protected and was a good anchorage.
Not long after we were anchored, two men in a small boat came to visit us and after a bit of a chat, we gave them a large bottle of water and two bags of rubbish, not a bad deal I reckon.
Luke wanted to go and find a warung to buy tonight’s dinner so I dropped him off at the nearby village while I went for a dive for a few hours. The coral was pretty good, but the visibility was down due to the strong winds and there was a strong 2kt current.
After some trial and error, I soon found where the best coral was and I would motor the dinghy way up stream and then drift with the strong current in five to ten meters depth for a couple of kilometres while tethered to the dinghy. Occasionally I would see a large fish or a turtle, but mostly the fish were very small.
There was a small sand Island here wedged between two larger Islands that was a tourist attraction for Indonesians wanting to post selfies on Instagram and Facebook.
It was nothing special and no different to the thousands of sand Islands I have seen in my travels, but when there was no wind the vibrant colours of the turquoise shallow water and rich dark blue of the deeper water does look fantastic.
The funny thing was, today it was blowing a gale and it was high tide and only a very small portion of the Island was visible, yet a constant stream of small fishing boats braved the conditions all day taking Muslim tourists back and forth risking their lives to get that iconic photo for a fee. They must have been so disappointed with the results they got in todays shitty conditions. To us it all looked so stupid and meaningless, but each to their own, I guess.
I pretty much spent all day in the water or zipping around in the dinghy. I started to get a bit concerned about Luke when by late afternoon I still hadn’t had a phone call or message from him. I took the dinghy into the village a couple of times and couldn’t see him anywhere and I kept looking towards the village to see if I could see him waving in case his phone had a flat battery or something.
Right on dusk I get a call from Luke to come and pick him up and by then it was quite difficult weaving through all the fishing boats and rope lines in the dark to get to the beach where he was waiting.
Finally, I managed to pick him up and return safely back to Sirocco. It turns out there was no warung in the small village and so a guy offered to take him to the nearest one.
Due to the language barrier, Luke didn’t realise the nearest warung was over an hours drive away on the other side of the Island, so he spent three hours on the back of a motorbike wondering if he was being kidnapped and where he was going.
Anyway, he finally made it back to the village just on dusk after a long adventure and with a story to tell, carrying a bag of nasi goreng and sate ticks and we didn’t have to cook dinner that night.
The wind dropped off after dark and the boat stopped rolling around and it was a very pleasant anchorage for the night.
Track Sirocco’s progress
https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Sirocco
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