We've just left. We've just weighed anchor, and we've just left the anchorage of Tioman
And we're now heading to the Anambas islands. No wind, visibility is very hazy,
flat, calm sea. In fact when i last looked at the wind it was showing 0.0 knots.
We are slowly motoring. Kept the revs down, we're under 1500 RPM which has given us
a speed of about four and a half knots so I'm assuming we might have a bit of
tide with us, not sure, we'll find out when the tide turns in a little bit.
only activity really is a couple of fishing boats on the horizon one passing,
a few miles ahead of us now and that's pretty much it. So what we're doing is
now looking at all the waypoints on the chart, which we downloaded from the
Indonesian cruising guide author. they're GPX locations, which we've got on
the charts to look at. They're annotated with notes... very very useful. Interested
in some of the anchorages where they suggest anchoring opposites karaoke bars
and trendy coffee shops! So have absolutely no preconceived ideas
about the Anambas at all so this is why it's quite fun. We've
obviously done the research in terms of getting there and checking in but apart
from that, it's going to be all new!
Just saw a Kingfisher! Never ever seen a Kingfisher out this far. Flew around the
boat couple times, went off, came back and it just stopped over here. Was hoping
it might come back and you'd get a shot of him. Beautiful! Here he is!
As well as kingfishers, what else are we gonna look out for? Well, the other thing
apparently we've gotta look out for that way is there a submarines! Because this is a
submarine exercise area and on the charts it says be on the lookout for
submarines... I'm just hoping they're on the lookout
for us too!
Well since not much is happening at the moment I thought it'd be a good time to
clean the watermaker. What this means is just running some cleaning powder
through the system. So what I need to do first of all is collect...
about 12 liters in a 12 metre jerrycan from the watermaker, so watermaker
water in the jerrycan, add the stuff into it, cleaning powder. OK so this is
how it works, this is my two-way valve here we've got salt water and fresh
water, and that goes through this pipe and into the pump here, but we want to
isolate that, so we have another valve here where we say rather than
bringing in fresh or salt water from this way, we're going to bring it in from
this pipe here. That is the pipe. It runs free here so we drop that in to the
bucket and that is what it's going to be taking the water from. Meanwhile, the
excess water (which normally is thrown over the side of the boat) so that's the
non drinking water (the wastewater) currently goes through here. So it's
coming up from the watermaker, and out. But what we can do instead is to say
OK, come up from the watermaker instead of going out over the side of the
boat, we're going to switch it over to this pipe here. OK? And that is going to
go back into the bucket. So we have two hoses there, so one is sucking in the
water from here and the excess water is coming through the system being flushed
and going back into this. And that simply allows us to recycle this water that's
got the cleaning powder in it. Then finally we've got the product water
which I've diverted back to the bilge and you can see it's on a long hose
there I can bring that back and also put that back in there so any product water
we're making will go back in there so that we're not actually losing any water
at all. And in theory you'll see the water level drop a bit but it should
stay at least half full. We can run that for about ten minutes or so.
And there it is running away so you can see what is normally the waste water,
don't know if you can see the bubbles coming though there.
That's going into the jerrycan and then this is taking it out,
through that point there and into the pump unit here.
And then the product water you can see,
Like so. These gloves are used for a particular purpose and that purpose is
hanging on the end of Liz's line.
(Look. Is it a trevally or something?)
It's a small tuna but it's big enough to feed you and me tonight!
Look, Mills! Shall we put him here, then he doesn't slip off? Meeowww!
Great isn't it, Millie? (Yeah, about bloody time!) We have a very excited pussycat here. This knife is the
knife we're going to use to cut up the little tuna and the reason why I
mentioned this knife is because it was given to us by one of our Patreons
Captain Ron. Ron, thank you very much, you haven't seen this for a while, we haven't
either. We're now gonna put it to its proper use.
Last night was super super busy the gap between Tioman and the Anambas islands
is about 80 odd miles. It's basically one major shipping route, because you've got
all these boats coming up from Singapore heading up to Bangkok or to China, and
vice versa. So of course they're all going north and south, hundreds and
hundreds of them. Meanwhile we're cutting across. We were doing roundabout 085 degrees
so we're going across it. It was like going across the world's
busiest shipping lane. I mean like 50 miles worth of crossing boats. I thank
God for AIS, and radar of course, but we had a couple of close shaves. There was
one in particular. This boat had... it was coming up behind us and according to AIS
he was going behind us, and I could see first with his port lights then his
starboard light as he turned. Then at the last minute I looked up and I could see
both his port and starboard light. He'd turned back again so I had to get
on the VHF and just remind him I was there. Fortunately he had seen us and
according to AIS he was avoiding us. But boy that was scary when you look up and
the whole sky is just full of this great big huge tanker.
It was hard work, it was really hard work. I haven't really had much sleep at all, but anyway...
That's a waterspout. Think we want to try and avoid that.
Emergency storm dodging tactics. Having seen that waterspout, and then the big
storm that's following behind it, we thought we'd turn and try and run
parallel to it in the opposite direction.
It seems to be moving quite quickly.
Well this bodes well as we're just entering into the north west corner of the Anambas islands. We've just seen a turtle,
well I saw a turtle, Liz didn't see it. It was about two meters under the
water. Apparently it is their nesting season at the moment, so we are
hoping that this is a good sign. At the moment we're about 40 meters of water ploughing
through some eddies, so our speed has dropped down to three and a half knots.
That was a first anchorage that we were thinking of going to, but we thought we'd
go around the corner to a bigger bay.
I've been asleep most the day recovering from the events of the passage, but... Gosh
it's so beautiful here, it really is beautiful, it's like nowhere I've seen.
Never seen such clear water in a long time. Mountains all around, it's just
beautiful here, and so peaceful.