Wednesday 18 February – great snorkelling at Komodo Resort

We left our mooring ball in the morning and had breakfast on the way. We went through some frantic currents with massive whirlpools and churned up water. Luckily with our two engines we could easily motor through it, but it still threw the boat around a bit. We wiggled our way back north, through reefs and islands, passing some dramatic scenery. It is such a relief to have our new screen in on the navigation station that Lovat brought from HK, we have our more detailed charts back up, it took Rowan a lot of major resets and downloading of latest versions to get it working Sadly the Indonesian charts are well known for being inaccurate so we are constantly checking on satellite images.

We headed for the Komodo Resort where Rowan had booked us in for lunch, he established that they had a mooring ball we could use. The resort is on a channel between two islands and the current was roaring through. We had a real time getting onto the mooring ball, we landed up breaking our boat hook, lucky Rowan is so good at buying spares as soon as something is broken, that we have a replacement. It was too hard to pick up the ball in the strong current, Lovat got in the dinghy and with a lot of effort got us safely on to the ball. It was like a river running under neath the trampoline, very noisy when the tide turned and we faced the other way, with the mooring ball making a terrible noise as it bashed against the hull.

We had a reasonably good lunch at the resort, it did not have the best reviews, but the children loved their chicken nuggets and roaring around the restaurant, enjoying having the space to run wildly. The kids also loved the ice cream, actually we all enjoyed dessert. We enjoyed the afternoon on the resort’s lovely beach, we took it in turns snorkelling, the reef and fish were impressive. I saw a couple of fish I had not seen before plus two enormous cuttlefish, I think it was a Broadclub cuttlefish. So big compared to the normal squid/cuttlefish we see, these were about 50cm in length and 20cms wide, changing colour as they swam about, with huge eyes and loads of tentacle-like things at their mouth that they were using to get right into the coral. I read up about them and they are highly intelligent like an octopus. They seemed totally unconcerned about me. Sadly by the time I found Lovat the tide had turned and the visibility got bad, I could not find them again. The kids had a great time on the beach. We finally headed back to the the boat where the kids burnt off more energy bouncing on the trampoline, which thankfully is coping with the kids weight no problem. We have ordered a new one as it is definitely not going to last much longer.