Wednesday 7 January – heading back to Sorong

Phoebe and Dani went for a last dive in the morning, Phoebs is feeling much better and wanted to see the Mantas. Luckily it went to plan and they saw three at the feeding station and a wobegong shark. A great success. They fly back home early Friday morning so it was their last chance. As soon as they were back we picked up the anchor and departed as we wanted to get to the other end of Batanta island, so we only have a short hop across to Sorong tomorrow morning. We have a lot to do as we need to refuel and re-provision the boat for our slow trip to Lombok. We have a small weather window to sail West so we want to catch it.

We could see huge black clouds gathering, happily we had safely navigated our way out the fairly tricky anchorage, before the squall hit us. It was going the same direction as us, it quickly caught up with us and really churned the sea up, loads of current here too, so it soon became a short choppy sea, which stuck with us for ages. A complete white out, so pleased that Luke had brought out a new AIS antenna which had solved the problem of our faulty AIS, meaning people can pick us up on the charts.

We finally got to the anchorage in a lovely big bay, only to find Banana Split and another yacht there. We went to the other side which was much quieter, being a bit further away from the village. Once settle we headed over to the beach where the yachts were for a walk along a lovely white sandy beach. We arrived and some local girls produced a couple of coconuts for us, when she saw we were keen, she was dispatched to climb a very tall palm tree to get more for us. It gave Phoebs the heebie jeebies watching her up there with a panga. We opted to go for our walk and not watch. It was a beautiful beach full of gorgeous shells, and a mountain of litter sadly. On our return it appeared that most of the village were with JeldiJeldi and a mountain of coconuts. What they really wanted is pictures on their phones with us, we must have had a good 20 minutes of taking photos with the crowds, I understood them wanting a picture with Phoebs but with us oldies was surprising! There must have been about 30 people, all very jovial, sadly with red teeth, the betel nut give away. They rejected our tiny payment for the coconuts so we gave it to the kids and the girl who climbed up to chop them down for us. It was a very infectious happy experience, with no communication between us, as they spoke no English, we caught snippets on Google translate!

It was a lovely last anchorage to end our trip with Phoebs and Dani. They picked up a few gorgeous shells as mementos of their holiday.