Thursday 6 November – searching for Manta rays

I had to gulp down my first cup of morning tea as we were out in the dinghy looking for the Manta rays by 7:30am. There were quite a few dive boats around, but nobody was finding them. It was pretty difficult swimming in the swirling current which is full of Manta food, including quite a few stinging things, luckily not serious stings. We swum in circles for ages in the pretty murky water, we gave up in the end and returned to a well earned breakfast. It was a blue sky day, which are not all that common these days, often a white cloudy haze, this meant it was a good laundry day.

At midday we went out again in search of Mantas and this time we did see an enormous one glide beneath us. Rowan did see a couple of others but in the poor visibility I just could not make them out. We then had a very long snorkel around the islands. We came around one corner and found Chet and Jessy sitting on a gorgeous little beach have a bottle of bubbles. very decadent, they tried to persuade us to join them but we were on a snorkelling mission. The coral was absolutely stunning so much soft coral and very colourful. We did some serious work swimming against the current to get around the islands. I was always on the look out for crocs as there is a photo on the No Foreign Land App of a big croc right where we were swimming! The locals don’t seem bothered by them at all so we get a bit relaxed about it, but then we think of Kruno the Croatian who was attacked by a small one! The fish weren’t quite so abundant as in other places but the coral was spectacular. Sadly we have no photos to show you.

We had Chet and Jessy around for drinks in the evening, we wanted to pick their brains about our next destination that we leave for tomorrow, it is an island called Misool about 100 miles south. We are going to do it in two, day hops. Rowan has found us a speck of an island to stop at on the way down. Chet and Jessy had loads of info to give us about Misool they spent a month there, we have a couple of weeks. We need to be back at the main city Sorong by 23 November to pick up Clint, Rowan’s brother. We had a fun evening, Jessy is really into her wines, so Rowan managed to produce a couple of bottles to impress her. They had some great stories to tell us including how they met online in the Netherlands. Turns out Chet was born in Kenya, like me, he even had PolePole on his boat name list! His family left for the UK when he was 12. He moved to Amsterdam for work. This is his second sail around the world, he did it first in his thirties when he was single, but not the whole way, this time they plan to return to the Med where they set off from.