4th September 2008

After leaving Monkey Beach on Friday we motor sailed for 4 hours and then a bit of a breeze picked up and we were able to just sail for virtually the rest of the trip to Lingeh arriving there at 3pm. The charts, Maxsea and mud maps we had of the area were all out and there is a huge reef which comes right out into the bay and we were fortunate that we had good light and could see it plainly so had to go right out and around in behind the reef to anchor. It was a lovely anchorage but oh dear!! Before we even had the anchor down we were invaded with the locals in dug outs asking for things. There were about 15 of us yachts in there and we were hammered right up until dark - it never stopped and at times we had 5 dugouts hanging off our boat and they were standing up and looking in the windows. It drove you mad. It would have been nice if they were prepared to trade but they weren't interested in doing that. Needless to add all of us had up anchored by 7am or shortly afterwards the next morning and were underway.

We ended up that night in an anchorage called Telok Levilia which was lovely with no one pestering us, just a few local fisherman passing us by and waving - what a relief!! Besides Catala and us there were another three boats in there - Tiaki, Destiny 111 and Paunamu. We ended up having a Pot luck dinner on our boat and we had a lovely evening and it was amazing what we had when we were all getting down on supplies of fresh food. We had not met Destiny 111 before though.

Next morning Catala and us planned to leave just after 7am - we got our anchor up, but Catala was stuck fast so Dave had to get out the diving gear and go down - he only had 1000lbs of air left. The only way to get it up was by undoing the anchor from the chain and use a rope to pull the anchor up. In the mean time Destiny 111 thought they better get theirs up before we left and sure enough they were stuck fast but Dave had no air left. Fortunately Tiaki had a bottle which had been filled 2.5 years ago so there was no option but for Dave to use that so on went the dive gear again and down he went. Their anchor was even in more strife than Catala's and after disconnecting the anchor from the chain it looked like they were going to have to cut the chain and leave it. However, after Dave had done his bit they did manage to get the chain up so that was a great relief to them. Finally we were away 3.5 hours after first up anchoring but fortunately our next destination was only 15 miles away at an island called Gili Bodo.

Gili Bodo was a beautiful spot with crystal clear water and we did some lovely snorkeling there and stayed there for two nights. The first night, there must have been 20 yachts in there and we had a nice barbecue on the beach. The next night there were only seven yachts and we ended up having drinks on board a catamaran called "This Way Up". We saw our first monkey on the beach at Gili Bodo but of course when we were on the beach they were nowhere in sight.

On Tuesday (2nd) we had another short hop - 15 miles to come to Labuan Bajo for the next Sail Indonesian activities which started yesterday but will do that bit in the next lot. It was beautiful sailing down through the reefs and islands to Labuan Bajo and saw a few nice looking resorts on the way. Labuan Bajo is basically a fishing village but is the gateway to the Komodos where the Komodo dragons are and we are looking forward to going to that area next.