Tuesday 23 September – heading to Indonesia

We leave today as a tiny bit of wind is forecast for the next two days, we have to grab it when we can in these windless days. We have 280 miles to go to the Hermit islands, where we will stop and recover, they are meant to be stunning. It is still a PNG island, but it appears we are welcome to stop over, it is halfway to Biak in Indonesia where we will check in. Claudette has recovered sufficiently from her flu and sets off from Kavieng today too. Not much wind about but we were up and off just after 6am.

It turned out to be a cloudless hot day with the wind never getting over 6 knots, so the motors were on all day sadly. We do have enough fuel to motor the entire way, but soo much nicer sailing. We attempted putting Pinkz up a couple of times, initially struggling to get the top unfurled as it was so tightly wound up. Then I discovered I was causing an issue by standing on one of the many ropes! We got there in the end only to have to furl her up again as there was not enough wind to keep her up. The wind finally came in the middle of our supper, that is it got over 8 knots. We got Pinkz up and managed to sail from there on very gently.

We got a few chores done, I created a new radar reflector, ours smashed to the ground and the hard plastic shattered. I kept all the metal bits and managed to find two tonic water plastic bottles that the metal bits fitted into perfectly, so with some gorilla tape and cable ties we finally have a radar reflector back up. This is just as well as our AIS aerial has come up with a fault. We unplugged it in the Solomon Islands during the lightning storms. We just hope it hasn’t been fried, it does not have to be a direct lightning hit to fry the cables. It is an intermittent fault so fingers crossed. Although there are no boats out here, we have had a cargo ship go by and of course the inevitable huge Chinese trawling boats, blindingly lit up at night but with no AIS. A yellow helicopter flew over us at midday, and then headed towards the trawler we had seen, will never know what that was about!

It was so sad when we were refuelling at Kavieng, we used the Fisheries dock. The local lady who came out from the Fisheries office to charge us K100 was vitriolic, they have been taken over by the Chinese. She said most of the place has been shut down, all run by the Chinese now and the patrol boats they had to check on fishing practices, have all been abandoned. It is a free for all now for the Chinese trawlers. The lady was really venting her fury with Rowan. The Chinese own every shop in Kavieng, it is hard for the locals to extricate themselves from the Chinese clutches. We just read the other day about the huge Chinese mining Dam wall that burst in Zambia in February, dumping 1.5 million tons of toxic waste into the Kafue River, causing devastation to people, animals, crops – a huge environmental catastrophe. Only when America extricated its citizen’s from the area in August, because of air pollution, has it had any real publicity. It is an alleged government and industry coverup, Zambia is renegotiating its debt to China which does not help. Ugh sorry, I just hate seeing what the Chinese are doing to these poor countries as we sail around.

Better sign off on that note!