Sophie left Jayapura at 6:00 AM yesterday morning after clearing out of the Harbormaster and Customs Office the night before. Our noontime position is 01.22.977 South, 138.07.016 East, which means we covered about 175 miles in the last 30 hours. Most of this involved motoring with one engine on a constant westerly course just 7 miles off the Papua coast. We are still getting a 1 knot current that contributes to our speed.

We did a radio call with Per Ardua at 8:00 this morning. They are 50 miles behind us and are motoring along quite nicely.

Our original destination were the Padaido Isands, which are 86 miles ahead of us. We’ve heard it is a lovely coral atoll and would make an ideal rest stop halfway between Jayapura and Sorong/Raja Ampat. But we downloaded some new weather files today, and it now appears that some fresh westerlies will develop in 30 hours and then last for over a week. So I think we are going to skip Padaido and try to go straight to Sorong with hopefully little motoring directly into the wind. We still have a lot of fuel. It does mean that we will celebrate the US Thanksgiving Holiday at sea, with no internet access to stream football games. Sort of the tropical circumnavigation equivalent of O’Hare closing due to a snowstorm.

In this part of the world, October and November is a transition period from the Southeast Monsoon to the Northwest Monsoon. Based on the weather forecast, it looks like the Northwest Monsoon, with its winds and currents coming from the northwest, is starting to kick in. Our main reason for traveling so fast through the Solomons and PNG was to make it up here before the wind starts blowing in our face every day. That makes for uncomfortable travel. Once we get to Sorong, we get back into cruising mode where we only have to cover short distances between harbors. We will then spend a month exploring Raja Ampat. Based on the weather it looks like we are just barely going to make it.

Or maybe not. 🙂

As I write this, we just entered into a wall of brown water, the outflow from the Mamberamo River, whose entrance is 9 miles away. My chart shows that the river goes over 100 miles into the interior of Papua, and obviously takes a good chunk of it out to sea every day, because we just passed over this perfectly defined line in the ocean, turquoise on one side, mud brown on the other and stretching from the shore to the horizon. Our speed also just dropped a knot. I sure hope we get this current back when we are on the other side of this river delta.

We are certainly not going to catch any tuna in this mud. Maybe we’ll see a crocodile.

We passed a couple of feeding frenzies in the water yesterday afternoon. One of them involved 500 birds working low on the surface, with big splashes coming from the fish. Given the wind angle, we couldn’t directly sail into the frenzy. But we did see a marlin swimming along past Sophie, 50 feet away from us. At one point we were also joined by a school of 50 small dolphins who came over to play. Three or four of them would leap through the water at a time. It was all obviously choreographed. Jenna got some photos. The kiddies enjoyed the brief break from school.

It’s sunny and hot. The seas are flat. We have plenty of fuel and water and food. We are in constant sight of land. Now that Lauren is gone, it’s just me and Jenna doing night watches, the first time that’s happened on a passage since we sailed from Tonga to Fiji 15 months ago. Leo and Hazel are now doing an afternoon watch together, and that actually helps us a lot in the sleep department.

Pretty happy out here. No complaints. None at all. Except we miss our friends back home. And family. And football. Go Pats!

It is amazing how a relatively short passage of 260 miles results in a complete transition from one area of the world to another. We’ve been in Jayapura for almost 2 days now, and it definitely feels like we have left the rural South Pacific and have entered Southeast Asia. This is a bustling city of 350,000 people, and 340,000 of them don’t speak English. There is a completely different vibe here compared to the islands, and so far we like it a lot.

As I mentioned earlier, checking into Customs here was quick and professional. Customs is located in an air conditioned two story building right on the main wharf. They spent 5 minutes reviewing our paperwork there and then requested a ride out to Sophie to inspect the boat. They were quite friendly and took many photos of the boat and of themselves. They also did a quick and thorough search. Only 20 cruising yachts have entered Jayapura in 2014, but only 2 of them came from the US.

Afterwards they insisted on taking a picture with our family. How’s this for a potential Christmas card photo?

Clearing Immigration took longer, almost 4 hours. This was mainly because their photocopying machine was broken. We also had to travel to the national bank to pay the fee for Lauren’s Visa on Arrival.

We eventually got it all sorted it out and capped off the day by going to what Customs told us was the fanciest, most expensive restaurant in town, B-One. We shared 7 plates of Indonesian and Chinese food, plus some beers and fresh squeezed fruit juices, all for US$60. And this was the most expensive place in town! It’s one thing to hear that eating in restaurants in Indonesia is less expensive than cooking on your own, but to actually experience it is wonderful. From an eating perspective, we are going to be so happy here.

Yesterday, Jenna and the kiddies started off with Sophie school while Lauren and I went into town to sort out cell phone coverage and Internet access.

This sign is right on the main drag in Jayapura. I know in my heart that the further west we travel, the closer we are getting to our home, including our family near Boston. Here is a sign that proves it. I wonder if I can get a regular with egg nog to go with my half dozen honey dipped.

When school was over, I collected Jenna and the kiddies and we all had lunch at the Jayapura Mall. It’s a 4 storied, air conditioned retail palace, bigger than anything we’ve seen since Auckland.

Afterwards, everyone else went in hunt of an English-Indonesian phrase book while I returned to Sophie for a scheduled SSB radio call with Per Ardua.

When I dinghied out to the boat, I saw that my friends from Customs, Police, and now the Navy were waiting to search Sophie again.

The Navy officer, pictured in the plaid shirt above, led the search. He wanted to see our spear gun and asked if I was ex-military. They also did a very quick search of our bilges. They took many photos with their cameras, including more selfies. When I pointed out that if an Indonesian sailboat had entered a US port, the government officers would all be carrying many guns. They laughed, held up their phones, and said “We don’t need guns, we have these!”

I like this country.

Afterwards, they once again requested to take photos with me. Here is one with me and the policeman who is the master of this patrol boat. He lets us dock our dinghy on their dock and has promised to bring me a proper Indonesian flag later today. We couldn’t find an Indonesian flag to purchase anywhere between here and Auckland, so Jenna made a temporary one from a bit of white t-shirt and a red Sharpie.

Before they left, they wanted to know if I was planning to go into town to drink beer later that night, and if they could join us. I think we had a bit of a language barrier, because the Sophie crew went to a waterfront place called the Blue Café, which had ridiculously good food but like most restaurants in Indonesia does not serve alcohol. They never showed up.

Sophie has traveled over 2,500 miles since we left Fiji 10 weeks ago. When we left, we were concerned about heading off the beaten track and visiting countries like the Solomons and Papua New Guinea where there was the risk of encountering “raskols.” We were told that the political tension on the Indonesian side of Papua made the police paranoid and hostile. We were even told by some cruisers that two American journalists were beheaded here in June. (Not true).

What we have instead found are that almost all of the people we encounter on this leg of the adventure have greeted us with warmth and kindness. We need to lock the boat up at night in cities where there are young men who don’t have enough to do. But we’d lock our boat up at night if we were docked at Bell Harbor Marina in downtown Seattle. So there is not much of a difference between here and home.

People are inherently good. We are welcomed wherever we go, and I hope every day that my family on Sophie can live up to the standards of the people who welcome us into their communities. This next year in southeast Asia will be the best years of our lives.

Hollandia is the original name for the Indonesia port of Jayapura, the place where Sophie dropped an anchor at 11:30 this morning after an uneventful and fun 24 hours of sailing.

Lauren and I are still in the process of clearing Customs and Immigration, while Jenna is on the boat running Sophie School while watching our anchor. We dropped the hook in 80 feet of water in front of the container terminal but will move closer to town in a bit.

Initial impressions of Indonesia:

• When we docked the dinghy at the container terminal, one of the guys hanging out there asked where we were from. We said USA. He said “Barack Obama is from Indonesia!!!”
• The cruising websites are full of scary stories about this place. So far I have encountered the friendliest people of our entire trip. Easily. The Customs guys were taking selfies on the dinghy ride out to the boat, and then took turns posing for pictures at the wheel. But they were also totally professional.
• We went to the National Bank to pay for Lauren’s Visa on Arrival, and the clerks in the back room made me feel like I was in a high school classroom full of giggling teenyboppers taking turns trying to understand our English words.
• I am writing this from a hotel bar, where we are killing time waiting for our passports to be processed. The barkeep asked Lauren if she wanted another beer. I held up my fingers, indicating 2. He brought me 2 beers.
• Very very few people here speak English.
• This is the biggest, most modern city we’ve been in since Auckland. We have left the third world.
• I look at the menus of the restaurants on this street, and I am seeing a lot of really good food.
• We’ve had a blast on Sophie Adventure Cruises over the last year. This next year will be better. And I am not just saying this because I am a natural optimist. It’s because we are visiting Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

More tomorrow …

We were tired and hungry after swimming with manta rays yesterday morning, so we decided to grill cheeseburgers for lunch when we got back to Sophie. And yes, Steven Fell, I was thinking about you while I ate my cheeseburger in paradise. It was delicious. If I am ever in a position where I need to arrange a last meal for myself, it will be a cheeseburger that I will eat while anchored in a remote tropical atoll.

Our 36 hour pit stop in Carola Bay on Luf Island in the Hermit Islands of Papua New Guinea was an outstanding break in our 600 mile passage to Indonesia. There is a 150 person village there organized around a Seventh Day Adventist church. 8 year old children would paddle their canoes up to Sophie and ask if we wanted to trade with them. They offered fruit and beautiful pieces of handiwork made from varnished sea shells. They were seeking things like rice, laundry soap, towels, or t-shirts in return.

Jenna even traded her U2 concert t-shirt to last group of girls that came by to trade. “It’s for the band U2. I got it at a concert. You’ve heard of them? The band? U2?” She was met with blank stares. Later when I was telling this story to Leo, he asked me “Who’s U2?” I thought it was hilarious. Bono needs to come out here and donate his red guitar to the village.

A local named Bob took us around to a pass on the western tip of the island where manta rays feed. He said that during the new moon, hundreds of them gather at this spot. We saw 5 on our dinghy ride down to the point and had the opportunity to swim with one large one off of the beach in front of Bob’s house. We also saw a couple of decent-sized reef sharks. Bob has a written proposal for building a guest house on this point. Lauren gave him her underwater camera and will create a Facebook page advertising Bob’s efforts. I will post a link to it when she does so.

Per Ardua was with us during our stay in Carola Bay, and the kids from the two boats played with each other the whole time. We really enjoy buddy boating with another family. We could easily have stayed longer in the Hermits, but we need to get to Indonesia given the time constraints on our visas and cruising permit for that country. Besides, the weather forecast called for strong southeasterly winds, and we really liked the idea of covering ground without using the engines.

So we left Carola Bay at 4:00 PM yesterday and are currently 150 miles away from Jayapura. We turned the motors off at 3:15 AM and are currently sailing at 7 knots with a single reef in the main and a full jib out. We were averaging 8 knots for most of the morning. It’s a bright sunny day and we hooked 2 fish in the last 30 minutes but lost them both. Our noon position is 01.56.399 South, 143.09.124 East. We should drop anchor in Jayapura around noon tomorrow.

Lauren will be leaving Sophie in Jayapura, assuming she can get a reasonably priced airplane ticket back to the states. She has been an excellent crew over the last 2 months. We will all be very sad to see her go. She’s cooking a shepherd’s pie for dinner.

From Jayapura, we plan to sail another 260 miles to the Padaido Islands, a coral atoll where we will hang out for a week or two. Hopefully Per Ardua will catch up with is there. We are very excited to spend the next few months in Indonesia. For the last few months it’s just been a destination on a map for me. Tomorrow it will become real.

We dropped a hook here at 8:30 AM this morning. It seems like a nice village, and we will explore it later today.

We had an uneventful passage after our last update. A northeasterly breeze picked up, and we turned off the motor at 2:00 in the afternoon and sailed through the night with just a jib up. Lauren made mahi mahi cakes accompanied by grilled eggplant for dinner. Delicious. We saw 10 ships last night, and one passed a mile behind our stern. God bless AIS!

15 minutes into my 3:00 – 7:00 AM shift, a squall with 30 knot winds hit us. It dumped rain for 2 hours, and was very breezy through sunrise. The risk of sudden squalls is the main reason why we sail with just a jib at night, because it’s easier to control than the main. Especially when the wind shifts 180 degrees.

Anchoring here was a little tricky, because the harbor can be 100 feet deep and then suddenly have coral 8 feet below the surface. We had to set the anchor twice, and in my excitement to make sure there were no coral heads behind us, I had my nice orange Nokia phone in my pocket when I jumped in to check the anchor. Oh well. It’s ruined.

Per Ardua is here, along with an Australian expedition tour boat called True North. It’s raining. I’m going back to bed. It’s always nice to drop an anchor after a passage.

The seas are flat and the weather is hot. Sophie is currently running the genset, clothes washer, dish washer, water maker, 3 air conditioners, and the port diesel engine. It all works, baby! We have 3 loads of laundry drying on the lifelines, and there are no squalls in sight. Laundry dries quickly near the equator when there is no rain.

The children are relatively well behaved. They are cranking out schoolwork, and Leo is doing shifts and vacuuming the boat. They watched “Transformers” last night.

Our current position is 02.27.176 South, 146.17.542 East. We covered 150 miles in the last 24 hours, all of it under power. We have a 1 knot current pushing us, along with a slight easterly wind. It’s not unpleasant. Kavieng is 280 miles behind us, and we have only 92 miles to go before we drop an anchor for a quick break in the Hermit Islands. Our friends on Per Ardua arrived there this morning, and we will join them tomorrow once we have enough daylight to navigate through the coral reef and into the harbor. We’ll stay there for a day and a half, then continue on for 260 miles to Jayapura, our entry point into Indonesia. We’ll leave the Hermits on Tuesday afternoon local time and plan to arrive in Jayapura Thursday morning so we can have a full day to clear customs and immigration.

Not much else to report. We are running a radio net with Per Ardua on SSB, and they said we’ll be crossing a shipping lane to get to the Hermits. They encountered 15 ships last night, all heading either 330 or 150 degrees, which is the direction between Hong Kong/the Philippines and Eastern Australia/New Zealand. We’ll keep our eyes open tonight.

I made 2 big mistakes last night. I grilled these lovely chicken breasts stuffed with pancetta and parmesan cheese using our panini press, but I coated the chicken with a pickling rub that Lauren had made. The food was WAY too salty, one of the saltiest meals I’ve ever cooked. Then later on during my shift I watched the movie “The House Bunny.” It was TERRIBLE, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

So that is the state of our passage right now. All systems are go, and our only issues involve oversalted food and offensively bad movies at night. Tomorrow I hope to write a blog update from a very remote coral atoll, where we plan to swim, nap, and drink cocktails with friends. We’ll be 93 miles south of the equator.

Westward!

We finally left Kavieng yesterday around 3:00 PM after filling both diesel tanks to the brim plus the additional 2 20 liter tanks Leo and I bought at the Hardware Haus. We motored on both engines for 20 miles to get past the local reefs and underwater mine fields before dark, then switched to running on one motor at 2100 RPM, which is our new long distance cruising mode when there is no wind.

We’ve been driving this way for the last 21 hours, heading due west.

We have a little bit of excitement to report as we do our noontime position, which 02.43.407 South, 148.47.045 East.

To port there is a huge squall that’s been traveling parallel with us for a while. We can see its black wall of rain 2 miles away, but it is being polite and keeping its distance. To starboard on the horizon are two oil wells, each producing a large amount of black smoke. Directly ahead of us is a 10 foot long metal can anchored to the water, surrounded by swarming birds and small schools of tuna. At first I thought it was a F.A.D (Fish Attraction Device), but that makes no sense since we are 50 miles from the nearest land. I assume it has something to do with the oil rigs. We made a few passes through the fish schools with a line in the water. We could see them jumping on the surface. They were foot-long tuna. No hits though, including our not hitting the can. Glad we spotted it during daytime.

We’ve covered about 135 miles in the last 21 hours. Jayapura is only 483 miles away. We may make a pit stop at the Hermit Islands, which is a part of PNG and is only 233 miles to the Northwest. Our friends on Per Ardua are heading there, and it might be fun for the kiddies to swim with their kiwi friends. We can also supply Per Ardua with fuel and water.

That’s it. Dinner tonight will be pancetta-wrapped chicken breasts. If the kids finish school, we also might watch Transformers with them.

Until tomorrow …

It’s been a hectic day, but I think we will pull the anchor, head over to the shipping pier, load up on diesel, and leave Kavieng within the next hour. We’ll stop a night or two in the Hermit Islands, and then head to Jayapura, Indonesia.

The day started early. Jenna, Lauren and I were all up at 6:30 this morning. It looked like a sunny day, so I spent 20 minutes re-hanging damp laundry, blankets, sheets, and mattresses outside. Leo had left his hatch open the other day, and by the time we discovered it there was an inch of water on his cabin floor. With all the rain over the last 48 hours, it was impossible to dry out. Today started sunny, so we had a shot.

At 7:30, Jenna, Leo, and I went into town for errands. Jenna headed to the market for fresh produce. Leo and I went to the DHL office for our package. It wasn’t there, but the DHL dude was heading to the airport in their pickup and would hopefully grab it.

Leo and I then went to Customs so we could clear out of the country. When we got there, the door was locked. Eventually the local manager showed up, unlocked the door, and apologized, saying he couldn’t do anything because the power was out all over town. Perhaps we could come back later? We hung out for a bit more, and then the 2 women who worked there whom we had dealt with earlier in the week arrived. One gave me my form for getting duty free fuel. She said we would have to come back when power was on before we could get our clearance.

We took a photo of them with Leo (above.) The one in the red shirt is very nice. She is an intern there, and her middle name is Seattle. She doesn’t know why her dad named her that.

Leo and I then went to Joe Tong’s Market Town and bought 3 dozen eggs and 4 bags of bread. We then got a call from the DHL lady: our watermaker parts had arrived! We walked 3 blocks to the DHL office and found this beauty waiting for us:

It took just one week to ship this box from New Zealand to remote Papua New Guinea. I was very happy.

Next Leo and I went to Hardware Haus (this part of NewGuinea used to be owned by Germany) and bought two 5 gallon gasoline cans. We can only buy fuel in 200 liter drums, and we decided to buy 4 drums. We liked the idea of having a little reserve just in case we don’t have room for 800 liters in our main tanks. Besides, our friends on Per Ardua left 2 days ago and are low on fuel. We might bring them some. It’s what motherships do.

Next, Leo and I called Jenna on the VHF and requested a pickup on the beach. While we were waiting, a longboat pulled up and offloaded a large crate containing 30 chickens. Stuff happens.

Jenna picked us up and we returned to Sophie. I then dinghied into the commercial wharf to see if we could change our “fuel bunkering appointment” from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM. Daniel, the local manager, sat me down in his office and spent 15 minutes calculating our fuel bunkering charge. He finally came up with an answer: $93.80 kina (~$US30). He also requested that we come at 1:30 so that we don’t cut into their lunch break.

I then paid him and crossed the street to Island Petroleum to pay for our 4 drums of fuel, which they would then deliver to the commercial pier. They had said earlier in the week that they accepted credit cards, but it turned out that they only accept debit cards from the Bank of the South Pacific or Westpac. We have neither. So Jenna and I made multiple trips to the ATM to get cash for our diesel yesterday.

When I got to Island Petroleum, the girl at the counter told me that I had the incorrect form to waive the GST from my diesel purchase. I needed a form from Inland Revenue, not Customs. At this point, I said “the heck with it” and bought the fuel with tax in cash.

I then went back across the street to the commercial wharf, grabbed the dinghy, and raced into town in order to get to Customs before they went on their lunch break. I made it there by 11:30. The woman above in the blue shirt was there, and she very quickly stamped our passports and gave me our yacht clearance papers for PNG.

At this point I was pretty hungry, so I swung into the Kavieng Hotel bar for a very quick cheeseburger and beer. I then went back by Joe Tong’s for a bag of onions, and in our shared desire to spend all of our kina while we were in PNG, bought a case and a half of beer at Joe Tong’s Discount Liquor Window. I then got back to Sophie. It was 12:15.

While I was in town, everyone else put away all of the hanging laundry, reassembled Leo’s room, started Sophie school, and got the boat ready for passage. It then started to rain.

Believe it or not, this is a typical clearance day. Off we go, bathed in luck. And our watermaker is working beautifully…

… we updated the “About the Crew” (us) and the “Guest Crew” (people who did passages with us) pages on the blog. First time in 18 months.

We also created a new “Visitors” page to celebrate everyone who has flown out to spend time with us. Enjoy!

We’re still in Kavieng, just 120 miles south of the equator, and we’ve had a lot of rain recently. I mean a LOT of rain. In Fiji it didn’t rain once from the beginning of August through the middle of September. We’ve had 4 multi-inch dumps in the last 3 days here in Papua New Guinea. These showers last less than an hour, giving us time to swim and explore. But when it rains here, it rains.

The hose on our water maker remains broken, and we believe that its replacement is on the plane from Lae that lands in Kavieng within an hour. If that does happen, we will leave for Indonesia tomorrow.

But in the meantime, all of this rain everywhere in Kavieng has made us rethink how we go about getting water on Sophie. As an experiment, we tried our hand at building dams on deck to capture rainwater into our water tanks.

We didn’t get vey sophisticated here. Our deck fittings for the water tanks are located in gutters along the side of our foredeck. We simply rolled up some towels and placed them right behind the tank openings. We also laid out some sheets and hoses on the deck and coach roof to direct water towards the general direction of the tank openings.

The result? This water tank was empty 3 days ago, and it now has over 100 gallons of rain water in it. The other tank caught a similar amount. The decks were clean before the experiment, and the water goes through a carbon filter before we use it. So we feel better about drinking this water than water we would load from sources on shore.

The water maker will continue to be our primary source of fresh water moving forward, but its good to know we have a working alternative, at least when we are in rain country.

It also means that when we are in rain country, we can turn on the air conditioners instead of the water maker when we are charging our batteries with our generator.

No one on Sophie is complaining about that right now.