Ariana Time

I have been reminded by many sources of our failure to update our blog so to follow will be some "rapid fire" blogging. Ha! If that were possible from us with sooo much time to write. I will try to fast forward through Indonesia to Singapore, up the Straits of Malacca (ugh) to Penang (food!!!!) to Langkawi to Phuket.
So here goes with the first installment from the archives. Now where did we leave off?

Kavieng to Jayapura
The voyage from Kavieng over the Hermit Islands to Vanimo was our last leg in PNG before entering Indonesia. We departed Kavieng on mid-April with a fresh breeze out of the northeast and clear skies. We cruised outside Lavongai lagoon until we reached Utupua where we anchored for the night. From there it seemed as if we entered the ITCZ where we remained for the next many weeks until we reached well south into Indonesia.
Off the Admiralty Islands on our way to the Hermit Islands we first encountered squalls. By the morning of 21 April we were off the southeast entrance to the Hermit Island lagoon. The chart plotter was off by at least .5-.75 miles. About 5 miles out we hooked and landed a blue marlin. We had to lash it to the transom and tow it in with a line through its gills. Entering the lagoon and making our way to Luff Island was made more difficult by the unsettled weather that brought squalls and rain, hampering visibility.
The anchorage off Luff is steep to and exposed to the eastern squalls that seemed to prevail at this time of year. Enoch and others in the village paddled out to greet us. I showed them the marlin which they were very excited to see. Enoch got it into the beach where I filleted it under a big tree on the beach in a tremendous downpour. The women of the village crowded around me as I filleted the giant fish and Enoch distributed pieces to each of them. That marlin ended up feeding the whole village.
There were a couple of other boats anchored at Luff. One was a big red modern cat owned by Matthew and Tiffany with their cute little girl Shawna (sp?). Mathew was a larger than life figure. A giant, hale and hearty South African about 6’4” with a laugh to match his size. Giant hams of hands and a blond pony tail that stretched to the small of his back. His cat looked like a giant red water bug. Matthew had built the cat in Dubai and was moving to Port Vila. Wrong time of the year as the SE trades were going to fill in for sure.
Mathew and family departed Luf in the face of some nasty looking squalls and some pretty strong headwinds. But Matthew was one of those who appeared that the fates are always favorable. Sure enough we heard later from friends in Kavieng that Matthew ended up meeting and becoming friends with a tugboat captain who happened to be towing a barge to, you guessed it, Port Vila, Vanuatu. We continued to meet people along the way to Thailand who had met Matthew in Singapore or Malaysia.
The other boat at Luf was manned by a frenchman and his woman coming from the Philippines. I forget their names. Nice but quiet. She wanted a child but they were having no luck. They ahd been trying all of the native fertility tricks to no avail. I gave them the remainder of our PNG smokes. They were chain smokers, as are many of the French yachties we meet.
Never again will we bring smokes to trade with the natives. It caused a significant frenzy on Luf Island as there had been no trading boat there for many months and the island smoker had run out of tobacco. Canoes were lined up next to ARIANA at all hours asking to trade for smokes. We get knocks on the hull after dark. It started get a little out of control until we discussed this with headmen Paul, Bob and Stanley.
We finally bid farewell to Luf Island and headed west to the Niningo Islands. We arrived off what should have been the southern entrance to the lagoon about 16:30 but a wicked tide and chop were obscuring the narrow entrance. The reef was littered with wrecks in the area of the entrance and we approached as close as we dare until we called it off. We did not want to join the other battered hulks on the reef. We did not have time to make it around to the west entrance before dark so we aborted and turned our course south west to Vanimo.
We arrived off Vanimo the next morning amid thunder showers. The ITCZ seemed to be relentless. A weather theme instability that seemed without end. A transition that seemed quite permanent.
Vanimo is a small, dusty coastal town on the main of Papua New Guinea. It is the border town with Indonesia/Irian Jaya. No much happening at Vanimo. There are a couple fo very good breaks at the entrance to the harbor. They were not really working during our time there, which probably made the anchorage more comfortable. We obtained our Indonesian visas at Vanimo at the consulate there. There are an airport, a couple of small hotels in town, a pathetic market, and friendly locals milling about. Timber seems to be the main industry that supports this port town on the frontier. We tried to spend our last Kina at Vanimo but we soon ran out of things to buy. The “supermarket” had little to offer. After a day of rest we departed Vanimo for the 40nm voyage to cross the border into Indonesia at Jayapura.
Jayapura while only 40 miles away seems to be in another galaxy than Vanimo. Indonesia is pumping big dollars and importing many Javanese and Malay Indonesians into the Jayapura area to offset the indigenous, and increasingly discontent, Papuan/Melanesian majority. It has buildings of many stories, comparitive sky scrapers taller than anything we had seen in almost 9 months. They even had coffee shops where you could actually buy a cappuccino. After half a year of cruising through the Solomons and PNG where you could rarely buy a cup of instant coffee, this was incredibly impressive. But the garbage of Jayapura harbor was appalling. We had not seen anything like this before. The rubbish and filth that polluted the harbor and clogged the two rivers flowing into the bay was truly disgusting. What a disturbing change from the pristine waters of just days prior. The product of a civilized world of petrochemical based wrappers, bags, bottles and packaging. Progress????
We launched our dinghy and found the only place to get ashore was over the stern of the local police boat commanded by Ridwan. Ridwan welcomed us and advised we would be better to anchor close off his boat where it would be safer. We shifted anchorage later that day. It was incredible to see the police boat fueling operation that afternoon where a fifty gallon drum was first pumped into a drum cut in half, and from there into the police boat by another pump bound together with tire tubes spewing diesel everywhere. Crew members were literally bathing in the diesel. No way we are even attempting to fuel here.
Jayapura has an excellent supermarket where you could buy almost anything you could imagine. It was the best we had seen since leaving Port Vila early last November. Stocked up we hauled anchor late in the day bound 800nm for Sorong on the northwest corner of Irian Jaya.