12th September 2008

We had a pleasant sail & motor sail to Gili Banta - a distance of 16 miles. Once anchored Dave and I went in the dinghy across to a spot between two islands for a snorkel and probably saw the nicest coral we have seen since being in Indonesia and thousands of beautiful coloured fish.

It was actually nice to be in a bay where we were not pestered by local Indonesians coming up to our boats trying to sell us masks, carved Komodo dragons and pearls and they don't take no for an answer. That night we had a pot luck dinner on Destiny.

Wednesday morning we were all up early and up anchored just after 5.30am to try and get as many miles behind us as we could in daylight. For the first time since leaving Darwin we had a lovely breeze and sailed the whole day and by 3.45pm had covered 57 miles and found a relatively calm anchorage on the north coast of Sumbawa. Even though there was a small village there they left us in peace. Te Wai Pounamu arrived about an hour after us and we all had sundowners on Purnama.

Yesterday Destiny, Purnama and us set off with another early start and had a good breeze first thing but then it gradually died so covered the 45 miles to Satonda Island with a mixture of straight sailing and motor sailing, arriving just after 3pm. Immediately dived in for a swim and then went ashore for a short walk to view a crater lake which was really quite large. Satonda is a volcano and believe it or not the crater lake is at sea level.

Te Wai also came in and the four of us had a pot luck dinner on our boat. Everybody is getting pretty low on food rations so having the odd pot luck dinner helps everyone out by providing a few more food options and variety. We have about five more meat meals left so feel we haven't done too bad. Unfortunately we still have not caught any fish. I think they are all fished out by the locals.

Another early start for the three of us this morning and we had a lovely breeze to start with and had hoped to get 60 plus miles under our belt but after a couple of hours the wind and tide were against us so are now going to do an overnight passage to Senggigi on Lombok Island. At present we have the spinnaker up and are getting along at 5.2 knots but that can vary in a short space of time and down to 3 knots.