Friday 9 January – early goodbye to Phoebs and Dani

We were up at 5am to say goodbye to Phoebs and Dani, so sad to see them go, we’ve had a great time. Phoebs is over her cold and Dani seems to be the only one of the 4 of us not to get it. My tummy troubles are getting a little better after taking some medication. Rowan took them into the marina where Nur met them to go to the airport. The dinghy was fully laden, I have bought the kids so much basket ware on our travels, and they are taking Han’s loot, so they have some big bags. It was good to hear from them that they were on the plane and by huge coincidence were sitting next to the son of the couple on the boat Grace, who we met for dinner at the Waisai marina. Thankfully they had no delays, unlike poor Luke and Milly had.

We sat out on the boat until 8am hoping to get the new pin that the marina was making for our swivel shackle for the anchor, which we had lost in Misool when the anchor fell off. Sadly island life caught up, Wick the owner who we gave it to ages ago had obviously only just got around to machining it and it had not worked. We did not want to hang about as we have a weather window of wind to head west. We motored off into a wide channel south of Batanta island that we have not been through before. No wind as expected as we were in the lee of the island, but plenty of current against us. As we got near to the western end the water was so choppy from the current, it was big choppy waves we were motoring into. It was a long hot slog, made worse by the fact that it was the worst rubbish in the water we have seen anywhere. It was like ploughing our way through a rubbish tip, so incredibly sad. I can’t see any way it can be collected or reversed, it must be devastating on the marine life. The current obviously brings it roaring in and out, we hit a huge log that sounded awful, but appeared to have caused no harm. This side of Batanta seems totally uninhabited, steep mountains from the sea, with pristine looking jungle, contrasting starkly with all the rubbish in the sea.

We finally got to the western end of Batanta late afternoon, Rowan had picked a bay there that was marked on our NFL app as a good anchorage. It was a deep bay with a couple of streams running into it, brown beaches, stunningly wild and remote. We got the anchor down, pleased to be settled when we heard a noise, it was the rain from a squall hitting the trees. The mountains seem to create a lot of weather here, we had a couple of downpours to contend with. An easy supper of baked potatoes and we were glad to get to bed, it had been a long day.

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