Thursday 5 March – sitting tight

It was wonderful having a lie in and that there were no issues last night. We had lots of sorting out to catch up on today. We still have an overheating alarm on the one engine which we have had almost since we left Sorong. We thought we had resolved it when we filled up the fuel tanks but it is still persisting. It most probably is dirty fuel filters but the new filters we bought in Sorong are not correct, so we will have to wait until Lombok. At least the new battery is working perfectly. We also had to change our air tickets home as we were booked from Bali on Qatar airlines via Doha, it certainly does not look like the war will be sorted by the end of the month! Especially at the rate Trump is stirring things up. We have rebooked via Singapore, from Lombok. That meant cancelling our flight from Lombok to Bali. This all takes so much time. I had a mountain of guest laundry to get through too, and we needed to make a lot of water to do it.

We went for a snorkel late morning such a relief to cool down from the heat. The coral was really spectacular, just sad that there were not a lot of fish, the few fish were all small, it feels heavily overfished. There are locals here fishing today, it is so far from any village, they must be pretty desperate.

We invited Seb from the cat in this bay, and the three other cats in the bay next door for drinks late afternoon. Seb is on his own while his wife and kids have gone home to Australia for a few months. The other boats had the two male solo sailors that we have seen in Rinca, and another Aussie cat with a couple on it. All Aussies who know each other, an eclectic bunch. Seb came over with a bucket of huge oysters he had collected off the rocks, he shucked the oysters at the table, I was glad he does not drink, as it was pretty lethal digging open these huge old oysters with a sharp knife. They have all been cruising a while, everyone is going to LBJ on Saturday, we are the only ones heading west to Lombok. They all left in the dark just as it started to rain. It was lucky they left when they did around 8pm as we had the most almighty storm. The lightning and thunder just kept circulating around the bay. It was spectacular lightning, just rather scary, these boats don’t need a direct hit to send all the electrics crazy.. It can take months for the effects of the lightning to surface. The rain chucked down, the heaviest we have seen in a long time, we were happy to tuck up into bed as the boat swirled around in the wind.