Daily Log by Graham

We made it to Banda, barely. What a perfect day on the water yesterday. No sailing and absolutely no wind or waves either, but still perfect. The water was like glass all day without a ripple on it...

We made it. Last night turned pretty ugly after about 1am when the clouds came over, blocking out the moon. The wind picked up as well so I rolled the genoa in a little bit even though it never got over 22 kts...

It’s 10:30pm and Chris and I just got back from a 7 mile dinghy trip looking for oxygen. It all started about 3 hours ago when I was on Family Circus having a chat when we heard Georg yelling out for Chris to come over...

This morning’s activity is officially a highlight of the trip so far. Air Borek is famous for it’s manta rays and today we found out why. We all jumped in our dinghies and headed out on the beautiful calm water around 9am...

We received some great news the other day that my parents will be coming for a visit in early April. They are flying into Flores where they’ll spend a few days in luxury before joining us on the boat for a week or so in not so luxurious conditions...

We said a temporary goodbye to ZZ and FC this morning as we left for Waisai at around 10am with about 15kts on the beam. This meant we could put up both sails and actually sail...

Where has the last week gone? I can’t believe we are already into February! It’ll be Xmas again before we know it. Anyway, I’ve been pretty miserable over the last week, hence no log entries, as my knee and leg swelled up like a balloon stopping me from doing anything fun...

Ah, nothing beats being out of the boatyard. We are anchored off the marina restaurant in Sorong surrounded by huge cargo ships spewing exhaust smoke and blowing their horns every few hours, speeding police boats, as well as Indonesian fishing boats and liveaboard charter boats. It is heaven!

Recovery day. Yep, a pretty boring day of just lying around watching the waves crash on the nearby beach. The anchorage we are at is listed in the “Cruising Guide to Indonesia” as a rest stop only and they are right on the money. The anchorage is as rolly as we’ve ever had before...

Biak City at last. We arrived early yesterday morning at 8:30am after a pretty crappy night of sailing/motoring. It doesn’t matter though, because we made it, mostly intact. The log that bashed into our bow also did some damage to our rudder by removing some of it. I’m sure we don’t need all of the rudder to keep going. Right?

We got up nice and early this morning in preparation for our last passage in PNG waters...

We made it to the Hermits. Woohoo! At about 11am this morning while looking at the charts on the iPad we realised that we were going to arrive at midnight if we didn’t do something...

Here we are in Kavieng! We left Kokopo yesterday at about 10am for the approximate 28 hour journey to Kavieng. There was no wind when we left which turned the water to glass...

We decided to have a bit of a treat today. We’ve been struggling a little in this heat, and the fact that you can’t swim here due to the film of diesel on the surface of the water. It’s so bad sometimes you can smell it...

The last couple of days have been fun. I finally got to go dive on that WW2 wreck after spending a good 30 minutes looking for it again...

The last couple of days have been much of the same really. It's amazing how quickly you can settle into a new routine when required...

Yes, it appears we are actually going to do this - leave the country, sail across an open ocean and drop the anchor in a foreign land surrounded by myth and legend...

We left Airlie Beach today for the Whitsunday Islands. Yeah! It started off a little shaky though. We wanted to fill up with fuel before we left. There are 2 options for this

Today was "fix the anchor winch day". I got up early and had a coffee and then proceeded to take the old anchor winch apart. I did this so that I could take it to be inspected by the anchor winch people in Airlie Beach. It took me all day...

Well it's been quite a while since my last entry, mainly because we were so busy and I just didn't have the energy or will, to write much. We spent 6 days in the boat yard. They were brutal...

Today was a chore day. We slept in, did a wash, did a shop, went to the post office, scoped out the town and visited the dentist. Nothing major, just one of Lara's baby teeth cracked in half and we didn't know what to do...

There are 2 pressing issues on the boat at the moment. First being the anchor winch whose circuit breaker shat itself last week due to pouring rain whilst bringing up the anchor...

This has been a long time coming. We have been sailing, or cruising as it's known in our new world, on our 40ft catamaran 'Toc' for a couple of months now ...