Friday 13 February – Lovat and family arrive from Hong kong

We got messages last night to say it was touch and go with Lovat and family flying from Hong Kong. Monique, his wife works for Cathay Pacific and they were coming on standby tickets, it looked like there were 12 people waiting on standby. Thankfully they got let on at the last minute and had to rush to the gate. They arrived in Jakarta at midnight and found the nearest hotel full, as they only had a three hour layover they spent the night in a coffee shop. The kids had a bit of sleep on the floor before they caught the 6am flight to LBJ. All was good, our trusty Finus picked them up at the airport and Rowan met them at the dingy while I hastily repaired four broken strands on the trampoline.

It was so good to have them finally on board everyone was suitably excited. The kids are too cute, Amalie has just turned 4 and David is two sporting very blond curly locks. We had to get going straight away as Rowan had picked a beach was going to take us at least 3-4 hours to get there. The couple on Blue Yonder from yesterday had spent three months at this beach and had created a den there that we could go and use. The biggest draw was that there are two resident komodo dragons that frequent the beach, plus monkeys and dear. We headed off and joined a long procession of phinisi boats, about 7 of them, luckily all heading to Komodo Island while we were heading to a remote area on Rinka island. It was a cloudy day with no wind, so a very gentle motor with some stunning scenery. The islands all looked so green. We had a narrow area to get through between two islands which is renown for its ferocious current. When we entered we could see the waves of the current, it got up to 3.5 knots with us. We finally got into the remote bay and were amazed to see two other catamarans. The one had been at the anchorage at LBJ. Thankfully that were not at the beach we wanted to anchor at, so we got a great spot with a beach all to ourselves.

A boat lunch and then we were off to the beach. The sand on the beach was really quirky when your foot sunk into the sand it released big bubbles of water. This is all very volcanic around here, hoping it has nothing to do with that. It is a gorgeous unpolluted beach with loads of shells. We had great fun catching up with everyone while building sand castles. We visited the den that Blue Yonder had created, it really was amazing, they had picked up all the blue plastic and decorated the den under a tree with all the flotsam. They had also collected lovely shells and bits of wood. They had left an old gas tank that they had converted into a bbq with lots of wood, plus a swing and a table and bench. It really was inspiring.

The kids had a nap on the passage and were in great form on the beach, and still full of beans for our bbq for supper. Poor Lovat and Monique had barely slept last night, so it was an early night for everyone except for me as I caught up with three days of the blog.