We've been pretty lucky with the weather (talking of which we have had no rain, apart from one short light shower since we left Darwin for England in June). Last year friends out here had no wind. This year we have had wind on and off most of the time. We left Gili Lawa Laut mid morning and sailed a few miles West to Montjo Bay where we had a good snorkel, spotting a large sea snake, and explored the bay on our kayaks. It's a large bay with some pleasant beaches. A family of deer came down to the shore and explored the edge until eventually spotting us, they retreated into the scrub.

From here we made a long hop to a small village called Kilo on Sumbawa Island. We passed awesome volcanic mountains, the highest over 3,000 metres, some of the many cones looked recently active. We were able to sail most of the day at about 7 knots with a good wind which died off in the afternoon. This seems to be the pattern at the moment. Fairly strong in the morning, about 20 knots. However, the direction tends to change all the time because of the deflection off the volcanic peaks. So one minute we are putting up spinnakers, the next minute the wind drops and comes straight on our nose. So a lot of quite tiring sail changes. We are more used to putting up a sail for a day.

Kilo was a pleasant enough spot but we were engulfed by children and young adults in dug-out canoes demanding t-shirts and other items. We weren't that keen on basically begging but gave out various bits and pieces but it proved impossible to satisfy demand. As we left Kilo the next morning we spotted friends on Atlantia coming up from the South and we both headed for Medang Island. Four boats were anchored here and it was quite swelly at first. However, it settled down during the night. From there we did another shorter hop to Gili Lawang, an island off the East coast of Lombok where we spent a pleasant evening with Atlantia listening to some opera.

We are now moving around the North of Lombok aiming for the West side where from what we can hear on the radio there are a large number of boats already anchored.