Friday 21 November – Squalls and Han’s 30th birthday!

As we leave tomorrow and there is no water in the Sorong marina, we had quite a few chores to get done in the morning. We needed to make lots of water having drained a tank yesterday cleaning the clay off the anchor, and its chain and ropes. We also had to do some much needed laundry. It was a day of showers, the cyclone at the top of Australia is really playing havoc with the weather here. Luckily the spare cabin which houses the lithium batteries under the bed gets really warm, so a good place to dry laundry as there was no point in hanging it out.

We went out in the dinghy to explore more of the areas we never got to last time, hoping to find a beach to relax on and catch up on our newspapers. We exited our anchorage and found a huge big carbon fibre monohull anchored nearby, it was at the marina in Waisai, this time without the Croatian skipper but with the Mexican owner. We hadn’t gone much further when the heavens opened once again, we had to seek shelter as the rain drops are pretty ferocious when you’re moving. It was low-ish tide so we were able to find an overhang on a cliff and sat out the rest of the downpour. It was not too long. We found a tiny beach which was mainly coral, Rowan went for a swim around the little island, there was nothing to see and the current was roaring, glad he had flippers. We spotted another little beach, rare here in these karst islands, it had lovely sand and was a bit bigger. We relaxed on the beach for an hour or so reading. We packed up just in time getting back to PolePole before another torrential rainstorm.

We enjoyed a quiet evening in and managed to have a great birthday call with Han who is with Phoebs in Rome, staying with Clint(Rowan’s brother) and Xavi. They have loads planned visiting all the major tourist sites and a slap up meal organised by Clint in the evening. Poor Noah is still filming in Dubai.