Oh my god, how earth do you navigate through all this?
...but this particular time, it's come up, it's red, and it's hurting...
Come on then... show us your hopscotch!
This morning - it's very early, about half past six - we're just picking our way through the
narrow passage with coral reefs on either side to get ourselves to Tarempa
where we have to check out day after tomorrow!
It's a very beautiful...
Sunday morning over here in Indonesia.
Just nice to get some decent sun, and not much
cloud because for the last two days it's been pretty overcast, very windy which is
a problem going into Tarempa. If you remember in the anchorage of Tarempa,
when it was really windy when we checked in it was horrendous, the worst
anchorage we'd ever been in. So it's nice to see that the wind has abated, and
the clouds have disappeared. The forecast is quite calm for the next few days,
which is good.
Right now we are going through an area up the east side
of the island and around the top to Tarempa. Now this is the area that when I
first looked at the charts of Anambas, before we came here, this area I thought 'Oh
my god, how earth do you navigate through all this?' Because it's just patches and
patches of green, which is reef. Then someone told me that Navionics is out!
I thought, 'well it's impossible surely to navigate around here?' So as a consequence
we are running Navionics on the phone and Navionics on the chart plotter. Also
running C-map on the phone. Ovital, which is running Google Earth, and
also a new navigation system a kind of char plotting system which is very
similar to Ovital, which is called Offline Maps," All-In-One OfflineMaps",
which our new friend, John, who we met in Moonrock Bay recommended to us.
Now this can use any number of different maps and we've chosen to use ESRI
maps because the Esri maps have very, very good detail of Tarempa itself.
So we've got all these sources of information, which we're
using to work our way through. As it happens of course we also have waypoints
the waypoints are pretty reliable. So it should be pretty straightforward, but
it's always good to arm yourself with as much information as possible. And so
we've got all of these different sources of information to work our way through
this dotted reefed area.
Here we are. Tarempa town. We made it. and you may be able to see just how
close we are we are... I don't know 100 hundred meters or so away from the
harbour wall. So we are very very close. But fortunately it's a lovely bright day
at the moment at least, and there appears to be little swell coming in and out.
If you remember that was the problem that we had last time.
So we anchored much further up there, and got caught out by that Southwest swell
coming around the west coast and back into the anchorage. So hopefully this
should be a little bit safer. Not completely happy with being so close to
the harbour wall, but the prevailing winds will tend to push us away unless
we get a freak northerly. But we are have it on good authority that we're actually
anchored in sand just in this little spot here, so this is yet another
recommendation from the Howarth's. Thanks guys! We'll see how we get on but
not sure how long we're going to spend in Tarempa, we've obviously got to check
out, but we do want to go and have a little look around. Last time it
was very rainy and not very pleasant. so it'd be nice to at least just walk
the streets and go and check out the Chinese temple... and pick up some beer of
course! And see what Tarempa is all about before we check out.
This is the main street in Tarempa. There's literally just one street, it's
not particularly big, quite noisy with all the motorbikes going past.
It's only 10:00 in the morning so not much is open, however we have the rather
splendid looking fruit and veg stall just there...
and there's one just there. We've come to what is now our favorite coffee shop.
We're looking for a chemist because I seem to have some flesh-eating skin
disease after Millie scratched me on my leg. I've got to be... I dunno, aomethings happening...
Anyway we've been following a little sign on our charts to see if we can find
recommended chemists and we've turned around a corner where we thought it was,
and instead, we've ended up at the end of the street. And we are surrounded by kids
playing hopscotch! Hello! [Hello]...
Come on then, show us your hopscotch!
That's not really hopscotch is it? Go on, play - hop, hop hop! There there we go...
Look at this cheeky little girl...
So I've left Liz behind at the bottom the hill. I thought I would climb up here
to see if I could get a view of the port, because I haven't I hadn't been flying
the drone. Not here because there's a wacking great big naval ship.
Didn't really fancy the idea of flying the drone around the naval ship, so I thought I'd
walk up in and see if I can see... catch a view. But, of course, it's hot, it's sweaty...
...but perhaps the highlight for me...
...is some classic English graffiti.
Well there she is, there's Esper over my right shoulder. Dunno can you see her?
Looking OK at the moment. Wind is blowing from over the top of the hill, so
she's being blown out into the harbor, which is good. It's a bit disconcerting
seeing her so close to that harbor wall.
It's quite a steep climb up to the top of this hill, and it's a nice little view, but it's just getting so hot...
Absolutely cloudless day. This is the first cloudless day we've had in probably a
week or so. Well, I say cloudless, I mean it's cloudless over there anyway.
I better go back to Liz, see what she's up to at the bottom of the hill.
So we're in the apothecary. Liz, tell us about my horrible skin disease...
Oh Millie scratched you on the leg, which she does, but this particular time it's
come up, it's red, it's hurting, so we think we need to put something on it.
Antibiotic, yeah. OK.
Three times a day. Yeah, yeah I understand. OK.
So here, on almost the furthest point of the west side of the bay, is a Chinese
Buddhist temple built up into the hill. Lots of red...
...lucky color.
And the usual paraphernalia that you see in the temple... except for people.
There's nobody here but us chickens
It's great, you've got a great view right across the bay,
and fantastic view. And it's the middle of the day, and we're boiling hot! I can't
stop sweating, but it's nice and cool up here.
So I think it might be here for a while.
As you may be able to tell, or maybe you can't. But we are we are leaving!
Yesterday we were giving a little tour of Tarempa, but we didn't realize at the
time was that it was actually a national holiday.
So nothing was open, so we couldn't check out even if we wanted to. We couldn't
provision, couldn't do any shopping. Pretty much everything was closed.
This morning we got up early and we have now checked out and we've bought a few
vegetables, which is quite good, always good to have a fresh veggies on board.
There's not much to say really ,and not much to see, because the light is not
great. It's a little bit overcast. Rather than stay in Tarempa for another night
we've decided to push off. And we're going to head back down to a place called
Talaga, which we stayed at before. But that was just before a horrible
southwesterly squall came through for a few days. So we're hoping that we'll get
down there this afternoon with enough light to anchor off the reef. and then if
it cheers up a bit tomorrow, we might be able to show you a bit more of that.
Certainly from the satellite images it looks very interesting.
But here we are saying goodbye officially to the Anambas. I think it's
going to take us a few days to make our way west and unofficially leave. But yeah,
that's it, we're done for this year.
So we wave goodbye to Tarempa
And start thinking about heading back west.
So all that information on navigating through reefs and round islands, and you
still didn't know where west was?!
Yeah, well, OK so what we were gonna do was
after this episode, we were gonna talk a bit more about all that navigation
equipment. We actually recorded it, didn't we? And it ended up being
about ten minutes long, so it's a little bit too long to append to the end of
this episode.So what we've decided to do is to make that an "Extra" and it's going
to come out tomorrow. So make sure you subscribe to our channel and you'll get
a notification when that comes out. We'll just be talking in a bit more
detail about all the different types of navigation sources we use whilst
navigating. And a little bit about reefs as well, particularly.
So a few people have said when they've been watching the videos, that your beard keeps changing.
One minute it's long, next minute it's shorter. They're getting a bit confused.
Where are we at the moment ? Sort of medium/long at the moment. Can you explain?
It's my magic beard. Do you know what? I saw the comments,
I thought it was a bit obvious actually. We are recording these end pieces
retrospectively. In fact we do that as we're editing the videos.
It's just our way of winding up the episode, and perhaps
talking a little bit more about what happens, and try and make it a bit educational as well.
So it's just recorded a little bit later from the actual episode you see.
Hence my forever changing beard. I dunno, should I grow it really long? [Leave it] Leave it?
A couple of weeks ago we sent out an email to our website mailing list, and we
inadvertently got the subject line wrong. We said that we were going live and
we want your questions, so a whole load of you sent us a load of questions.
We weren't going live at the time, but we are going to be going
live and we've been wanting to go live for about a month now, but we haven't been
anywhere with good enough Wi-Fi. We can upload and email some things but it
needs to be really strong for us to do a live broadcast.
We're heading north, and we've got a few stops along the way, and one or two of them
may have really good Wi-Fi. If they do, we will do a live broadcast. And we will
notify you beforehand, so make sure you subscribe and you get that notification
because you're probably not going to have much warning on this. And it's going
to be on the refit. We are going to address the question of money - how much
it cost - and go into a little bit of detail about it. I know a lot of people are very
interested in that. This is the long-awaited one and a lot of you have
been asking about it. From our point of view, it's going to take quite a bit
of time to set up because we really do want to cover every single aspect, from
the carpentry to the osmosis treatment, the spray-painting, removal of the deck. Everything.
And we want to illustrate it with some pictures, and also get our sums
right as well to give you as much information as possible.
Yes, we don't need questions on that, we've had plenty of questions and we
have a lot of information to give to you guys. But we'll take your questions as we go.
Great. Talking of questions then... Just a couple of questions from the
email mailing list... I've got them here. John Christopher asks "how is the
workmanship of the interior refit holding up?" What do you reckon, Liz?
The interior specifically... I think pretty bloody good, really. I think it's really
good. I mean the colour has gone slightly darker, we knew that was going
to happen because that's just wear and tear. But generally it's in pretty
bloody good nick. Yeah very happy with it. What do you think? I agree.
I think the things are really cosmetic, aren't they? We did use this
very thick plasboard, formica-type surface in the galley that hasn't really
held up well. It's bubbled a bit and it's got a bit discolored hasn't it?
That was a bit of a disappointment. The lovely sky-blue covers for our sofas,
which we are sitting on now, as you can see, have covers on them. And that's
because a certain someone likes sharpening their claws on them. So we didn't get
that right at all. We put some new fabric in my office which is great, you can
sharpen away and it really does well. But this is hopeless. Also it just
gets so dirty so quickly. I think we need to rethink that.
We will be recovering it at some stage, but we've got more important things to do at the moment.
The other thing - I think we could have made the swimming platform a little bit higher.
That was one thing. And then, of course, we are going to be heading north.
and that means to do some adjustments to Esper's cockpit, chiefly
to build a hard dodger. Yes, we should have done that in the refit, but aside
from that all's good. Really happy with the refit. And there was one other question?
Yes, the other question was from Anna and she says I was wondering what you guys
do with the rubbish whilst at sea, It's a really big question, a very big question,
but it's one that we have already answered, Anna! If you look back, I'll put
a link in the description, or look at in our playlist - in our Q&A playlist. We did
a whole episode on what we do with our trash. Yes, and it's really controversial
isn't it apparently? What you should and shouldn't do with your trash. So yes, check the link.
Let us know what you think in the comments. If you liked the
episode, then please do SHARE it because it really helps us. Hit that like button...
What else? Do all those things on social media - Subscribe! Right, yeah, it really does help us.
So thank you. And we always want to know what you have to think. Comment below.
In the meantime...peace and fair winds!