8 August 2015 Banda Neira to Wakatobi (Day 2)
There was no change in the weather and we continued to have idyllic sailing conditions all day. Since we came through the Torres Strait, it's probably been the best, most consistent sailing weather that we've had in four years of cruising. Normally, we put an extra reef in the main at sunset, but we've not felt the need in this region.
After losing a lure to the swordfish yesterday, I spent an hour or so making up some new lures and putting new leaders and hooks on old ones. I had two lines out all day with different coloured lures, but no strikes.
We didn't make any water while in Banda, so our water tanks were down to 25%. I tried to start the generator, but it wouldn't turn over. Hanging upside down, lying across the engine and generator, on a rolling boat is not my idea of fun, but after 30 minutes of investigation, I found that a fuse in the starter circuit had blown. I tried to find out why, but I couldn't see any bare wires or loose connections - perhaps the fuse was just tired... With the generator running, we ran the water-maker for an hour and were able to have a shower this evening without worrying about running out of water.
Most Indonesians are Muslim and our knowledge of Islam is a lamentably thin, so we're trying to understand what it's all about. I've found a novel called "Mother of the Believers" by Kamran Pasha, which tells the story of the early days of Mohammed from the view point of one of his wives. It's well written and fascinating. The most interesting thing to me is the huge historical similarities between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, yet the few fundamental differences have caused such trouble.
The good weather continued until just after midnight, when a line of squalls overtook Glenys. There wasn't much wind in them, but she had to cope with 40 degree wind shifts and patches of no wind, plus heavy rain showers. We were still in the middle of it at our 1 am watch change. I got annoyed with the wind shifts and having to run downwind off-course, so I rolled away the main and sailed with just the genoa, which allowed me to come back on course.
With only one sail out, we slowed down, but it doesn't matter because we can only get into the anchorage in Wanci, Wakatobi at high tide and the next tide we can make in daylight is at eight o'clock in the morning on Monday 10th. At 0200, we had 125 miles to go, so we only need to average 4.1 knots.
9 August 2015 Banda Neira to Wakatobi (Day 3)
Just after breakfast, I put out our fishing lines and within an hour had hooked and landed a nice 2½ foot Dorado. By half past nine, it was all filleted and resting in the fridge. Fish Tortillas for lunch and pan-fried fish & chips for dinner...
It was another lovely morning with 15-20 knot winds from the east, so we ran downwind with just the genoa poled out to port. We were trying to slow down, but had a one knot favourable current pushing us remorselessly west. The wind dropped to less than 10 knots in the afternoon, so we drifted along at 3 knots in calm seas.
At sunset, we were 40 miles away from Wanci (giggling schoolboys, note that it's pronounced “Wanchi"). We picked up a strong broadcast on VHF ch16 from Wakatobi Information Centre (W.I.C.) radio, who were welcoming yachts to the island. I called them up and told them that we'd be at the entrance at 0700 tomorrow. They said that they will guide us in. There are four boats at anchor already and some had gone through the very narrow, dredged channel at midnight - not us thank you.
A bit later, I chatted to Karen from "Red Herring" on the SSB radio and found that they are already in the anchorage. Our cruising guide says that the dredged channel into the anchorage is 2.1 metres at HIGH tide. "Red Herring" went through with a 0.8 metre low tide and had at least 3.4 metres of water, so the cruising guide is completely wrong and we should be able to get in and out at any state of the tide, which is a relief.
By eight o'clock, we started to see the lights of shipping, mostly fishing boats, but we had two large commercial vessels pass within ½ mile of us. At ten o'clock, we heavily reefed the genoa and bobbed along at 2 knots with a scrap of sail and were rounding the north of the island at midnight. We've been warned that there are many unlit Fish Attraction Devices (FADs) around the area, so we made sure that we kept outside the 1,000 metre depth contour, which is about four miles off-shore and hove-to for the night.
10 August 2015 Banda Neira to Wakatobi (Day 4)
At dawn, we started to motor towards the channel through the reef. Gino from W.I.C. came out to meet us in a RIB powered by a 15hp outboard. He’s a nice guy, but his English is not too good and he’s a little chaotic. He babbled to us on the radio and said to follow him between the marker poles, which I think that he said had red flags and some other colour. He then zoomed off at high speed leaving us behind.
It was eight o'clock in the morning and the sun was very low in the sky, straight into our eyes, so it was impossible to see the colour of the water and the marker posts were difficult to see in the glare. There was a large dredging barge on the inside of the lagoon, presumably at the end of the channel. I tentatively motored towards the centre of two lines of flags. The water looked very shallow, but I had faith in the markers and carried on. Suddenly we hit the bottom, bounced over something hard and stopped.
Don’t Panic Mr Mannering! I tried to motor backwards - no chance! I tried to turn the bow with our bow thruster - no chance! I even tried to move forwards - no chance! We were hard aground. It was now one hour after high tide, so the tide was going out and, if we delayed, the situation would only get worse.
I ran down below and grabbed two long ropes from under our fore-berth, throwing anything in the way to one side. By the time I was back on deck, Gino had realised that we were on the reef and came alongside. I could see deeper water only 5 metres to port.
I quickly tied the two ropes together and gave Gino one end, tying the other end to our spinnaker halyard, which runs to the top of the mast. I then told him to use his dinghy to pull the rope to our port side, hence pulling our mast top to port and heeling us.
As we heeled over, I hit the bow thruster, which slowly turned our bow to port. At the same time, I gunned our engine in forward gear and with a couple of sickening lurches and bangs, we floated free. Total time from going aground to getting off was only ten minutes, but seemed like an hour.
From the safety of deep water, I could see my mistake. The red flags were hidden by the glare of the sun and the bulky shape of the dredging barge. On the other side of the channel, there were actually two rows of green flags and I had mistakenly gone for the middle of them - right onto the reef. As always, it was an accumulation of errors - tiredness, going directly into the sun and trusting rather than thinking - if Gino hadn't been "helping" me, I doubt that I would have done the same thing.
On the second attempt, we safely negotiated the channel and arrived in the relative safety of the lagoon. Now we had to anchor. There were four other boats anchored at the end of the entrance channel, but Gino insisted that we motor further south into the lagoon towards some mooring buoys. I think that he was telling me that he wanted all yachts to pick up moorings or anchor near them.
We attempted to pick up a couple of moorings, but neither of them had pennants to tie onto and looked dodgy, so we decided to anchor. We tried in a couple of places in 5-8 metres of water, but both times we dragged our anchor - it felt like loose broken coral. By this time, we were feeling very tired and grumpy.
We picked up a third mooring, which had a reasonably new pennant, but as the wind caught us and put tension on the rope, the whole mooring pulled away and we drifted off downwind with the buoy in tow. Finally, we anchored in 12m to the west of the moorings (05°19.80S 123°32.07E) and the anchor held, so we collapsed in a heap. We're in Wakatobi- we've survived.
We chilled out for the afternoon and were going to have an early night, but a welcome event had been organised at the W.I.C. office at seven o'clock in the evening, so we went ashore at sunset. Gino allocated us some “guides”, who are teenagers and university students that are learning English and they were keen to walk with us to the night market. It was fun to chat to them as they asked us questions in English - they are as interested in us as we are with them.
After wandering around the market for half an hour, we went back to the W.I.C. office and hung around for an hour chatting to other cruisers and the guides. They all want to have their photo with us for some reason.
Eventually, a lady stood up and started the proceedings, which were a series of little speeches by various teenagers, some traditional story-telling, a lovely little dance by a boy and a girl and a short song. It was like attending a school concert. They even asked me to stand up and give a little speech - I don’t know why I was selected, but I suspect that one of the other cruisers set me up.
We believe that the town is arranging a set of events that lead up to Independence Day on the 17th, but no one knows when it will start. It appears that the organisers are waiting for more boats to arrive. Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow. We’re in no rush. We've done 2,800 miles in the last 36 days, so we feel like a bit of a rest.
11 August 2015 Wanci, Wakatobi
In the morning, we went ashore at W.I.C. intending to go for a stroll around town. We were met by a group of the young guides and there was obviously no way that we were going anywhere by ourselves. A young lady called Novi and a lad called Rama accompanied us and were very protective, with Novi holding Glenys’ hand as she crossed the roads - very sweet.
We visited three banks, but none of the ATMs would give us any money. I talked to the manager of the biggest bank, but he confirmed that there is no way to get money over the counter - we have to use the ATM. It’s so frustrating.
The young guides proved their worth when they helped us to find a couple of dive centres and translated for us. I was trying to find a replacement “burst disk” for our scuba tank and had some success at the Mawadah Dive Centre. At first, the owner of the dive shop said that the only place to get the burst disks was from Jakarta and it takes at least a week, but then he searched around and found three old ones that look okay. I was astounded and very grateful when he just gave them to me for free.
While at the dive shop, we found out that they will do scuba dives for only $20US including a tank, provided that we have our own equipment, so I'm going to get a group together.
We visited the central market, which has lots of very narrow lanes between hundreds of stalls selling an eclectic variety of goods. Novi introduced us to her aunt who runs one of the stalls and we had to take the obligatory photograph.
After lunch on the boat, we went to do a snorkel on the outside of the reef near to where we are anchored. It was very nice, but not quite the vertical wall that I was expecting. The water is still a bit murky - will we ever get the crystal clear water that the tourist brochures promise?
We went for a meal at the Wisata fish restaurant with “Red Herring” and “Catimini”. This restaurant is built on stilts on the shore close to the anchorage and was very good value at 75,000 rupiah each with a soft drink. The only downside was that they didn't have any Bintang beer.
12 August 2015 Wanci, Wakatobi
There are now five boats in the anchorage and we all went on a coach trip to Tindoi village. Our small coach must be the highest vehicle on island because we had loads of trouble when going through villages. Our first obstacle was a tree with low hanging branches, which the driver tried to sneak under, but had no chance. The problem caused a crowd to gather and there was much discussion until someone had the sense to get a machete and dispatch a young boy up the tree to chop off a few branches.
We carried on, but had to stop many times because the mains electricity wires feeding the houses are strung precariously low across the street. Most of the time, the driver slowed down and simply eased forward with the wire dragging over the coach roof; at other times, they used long bamboo poles to lift the wire. Unfortunately, a few times, neither strategy was successful and three or four wires were ripped down as we tried to pass under them - no TV for those villagers tonight.
We safely arrived at Tindoi without being electrocuted and were met by the whole village (about 200 people) - some dressed in their traditional costumes. To the sound of a percussion band, we were led past people lining the street to a small field where some chairs had been set out.
There were a series of speeches welcoming us to their village and then they asked us all go into a tent to pray together. The village elders were already in there, so we sat on the floor and had a short Muslim prayer. The elders then revealed a huge pile of food and we were invited to tuck in. It was all very nice - rice cooked boiled in banana leaves, barbecued Tuna, donut-like cakes (Cucur), to name a few.
We were shown back to our seats where a lovely group of young ladies dressed in yellow traditional costumes started to perform a slow graceful dance (called Pajoge). A big plate was placed in front of the dancers onto which local men started to drop money as a kind of payment to be allowed to dance with the beautiful ladies. Within minutes it had turned into a mob of locals and cruisers dancing around the girls.
The next event was a slow fighting “dance” almost like Tai-chi (called Mansaa), where the two opponents make smooth movements to build up power and then quickly attack their adversaries in a non-contact fight. It was fascinating to watch and cruisers were invited to take part, which the villagers thought hilarious.
The men of the village then started to play a game called Hekansalu, where six, 30mm diameter, disk -shaped “Kansalu” seeds are set up in a line and the players then use their feet to slide other seeds across the ground to attempt to knock the line down. Following that, the women showed us a game called Hedaroji, which is similar to marbles, but using spherical seeds. For both games, we were invited to play, which was fun.
Back at boat, I ran around for an hour organising a dive for tomorrow. It became very complicated because we ended up with five divers and seven snorkellers from four boats, so I was running backwards and forwards getting everyone to agree a price and starting time.
“Catimini” have had a problem with their navigation computer and I (foolishly) said that I’d go and have a look at it. I found that there was a problem with their display, which was either a hardware fault on the graphics card or a driver. In a moment of madness, I deleted their driver and now I'm faced with a totally black screen. It’s their main navigation device, so it’s not good. I’ll have to have another go tomorrow.
13 August 2015 Wanci, Wakatobi
The dive boat picked us up at the W.I.C. dock and took us out to Sombu Jetty. We descended to 20 metres on a 60 degree wall and followed it north, returning at 12 metres. The visibility wasn't good enough to take long-range shots of divers, so I concentrated on small creatures, getting a couple of nice shots, including another nudibranch called a Swollen Phylidia. The dive master Arif, was very good at pointing out things and showed us a tiny, tiny shrimp on a sea fan which was so small that I couldn't see it at all until I took a photo and enlarged it.
In the afternoon, we were planning to have a rest, but discovered that we had no beer left, so we went out on a small shopping expedition accompanied by a couple of guides, of course. Novi seems to have become Glenys’ friend, which is great because she’s very nice.
In the late afternoon, I had another go at “Katimini’s” computer. I downloaded the latest driver for their graphics card, but that didn't seem to work either. I'm severely handicapped by the fact that their computer is completely in French, so working on it is a challenge. By the end of two hours, I was no further forward and was again faced with the black screen of death. The only good thing about the situation is that Roger has a good supply of cold beer.
David and Katrina on “Laragh” arrived during the afternoon. We haven't seen them since New Zealand, so we invited them over for dinner to catch up. At seven o'clock, we went out to watch a dance competition in town. We had VIP seats in front of the stage, complete with bottles of water and cakes set out on coffee tables in front of us. The dancing was good, but we sloped off at ten o'clock.