Red sky in the morning, sailor's warning.
Whatever, this **** looks cool. I wake up at like 5:30am for some reason and figure I should pop my head out the hatch to see if anything cool is outside. We aren't sailing today anyways, but going to see some affectionately called 'dick faced monkeys'. It's been just over a week of living on SV Savannah, a 40 foot catamaran sailboat, and we haven't done much yet besides spend a day prepping the boat and another 5 days crossing the Java sea in Indonesia. I'm 15 miles up the Kumai river now, on the island of Kalimantan, also known as Borneo, in a small amazon-esque town. The only beer available we have to pay a hefty surcharge for and go to the government ran brothel 10km away to get it. As-Salaam-Alaikum. I'm still so surprised that muslims get a bad rap. They're just boring and trustworthy with some backwards ideas on how to treat people, but that's inherent in any religion.
After 12 hours travel from Bali to get ONE island over, I see one of the boat's owners, Leah, running in the rain to meet me in a ****ty port city outside of Jakarta. She's embarrassed that the boat is covered in ash and silt from a mixture of volcanic eruptions and lax pollution laws causing industry in the area to spew mass clouds of debris into the sky 24/7. Some pleasantries and I'm off to bed after a long day, anchors up at 6am to set sail to Sianyang island for a test run. I stick my head out of the hatch in my roof to watch the lightening for awhile, wondering if we are 'dragging anchor', one of the only sailing terms I know from watching youtube vlogs constantly over the past few years. Nahhh, captain knows his ****, we're fine. Almost asleep, I hear weird buzzings, which I ends up being the engines turning on. We've dragged anchor over 1km in a crowded harbor, surprisingly not hit anyone, and are maybe 100 meters away from the boat being smashed into some rocks. Par for the course? Not at all, this is extremely sketchy as Leah throws on a heavy jacket and runs up to the front of the boat. I don't wanna get wet, so I just chill with captain Chris and try to assess the sketch factor for awhile, still rubbing the tired out of my eyes. Succumbing to the fact that we are indeed in the thick of it, I grudge up front in the pouring rain and wind to act useful in pulling up the anchor. We should be trying to help the captain navigate around all the other boats, moorings, buoys, and rocks in the harbor, but its impossible to even look up before getting pelted in the eyes with rain. The storm is loud as ****, drowing out any communication from one end of the boat to the other, so my contribution is being able to stand on deck and yell-relay messages back and forth to people doing the actual work. I'll take it, point for Bryan. So that was my first hour aboard. Rain cleaned the boat off nicely though, so saved us some deck scrubbing.
I'll get better pics of the boat in time, tough to get many good shots when you're inside it all the time. Climbed up the mast yesterday which is 70 feet high, will bring the gopro or something next time I do that and snap some shots.
We sail 4-5 hours to Sianyang island closeby. The rudder had fallen off on the previous attempt to cross the Java sea weeks before, and the owners had made the prudent decision to return to the ****hole port near Jakarta in order to ensure they got it taken care of properly. We seemed to be ruddering correctly and I was none the wiser to any previous mishaps. Pulling into a bay of an island with maybe 100 inhabitants, we would officially be setting sail the next day for a 4-5 day crossing. I had to scrape the prop first of any sea gunk that accumulated on it, and then wipe down the top half of the hull which was covered in a slime which decreases speed. Dirty, but water is warm so wasn't so bad at all.
Leah preps a ton of food and I kinda wonder why. My last time on a sailboat was so chill. I was the bartender and kept everyone drunk the whole time, smoked weed 10 times a day, had an aussie girl cooking for us so ate nonstop, and did maybe 15 minutes of actual work. Now we had what looked like a weeks worth of veggie burgers, pizza, cookies, stew, rice, veggies, and unlimited amounts of top ramen to be ready when we needed it. After the first day or two of getting pass the protection of nearby islands, fairly rough seas start. Wind is only 15 mph, but I guess catamarans feel more movement with less weather, yet also kind of max out when it gets heavy. Makes sense, I could imagine a monohull rocking like 90 degrees side to side as well as up and down. At least we are like a big square in the water with lots of bouncing but nothing major. Regardless I feel nauseous and am curled up in the fetal position next to the captain, splashing cold water on myself every 10 minutes from the shower. Back of the boat rocks the least so I spend awhile there and feel okay enough to take over when its my turn to go on watch. I understand why so much food was prepped, because spending more than 3 minutes down in the kitchen is hell. We have 3 people working in 3 hour shifts to make sure we don't hit anything, day or night. That's 3 hours on, 6 hours off - anytime we are on passage. It sounded so chill at first. Hardly. None of us sleep in our proper beds very often, as there's more boat movement the lower and more forward you go. Immediately after every shift I crash on the couch in the salon for 6 hours and wake up to the captain jiggling my foot - 'you're up Bryan'. ****, again? I have 16 hours a day technically of free time, but am probably sleeping 12 and then spend a couple lounging in the sun and eating. Anyways its not too bad as I know its ending soon. Really not sure I would be up for 2+ weeks straight of this though, or in any rougher seas. To pass the time I stretch, listen to hiphop, floss, and stare at stuff. Listened to a Dalai Lama audiobook. Dude is kinda jank and boring af. Nicki Minaj ftmfw. Shoutout Kyle and J Cole, wow.
Being on watch is actually kinda cool though. Your job is to not hit anything, keep an eye out for weather and wind changes, and use the GPS to plan routes around all the other traffic in the ocean. There's a computer system called AIS that tells you some of the other boats in the water, their speed, and your closest point of contact, so you just adjust auto-pilot to give a solid mile of leeway to any passing ship. There's also tons of fishing boats who don't use that system, who may or may not even have lights on, so you just guess what they are doing and try to go around them. It reminds me of crossing the street in Vietnam, everyone just kinda moving around each other and informal systems in place to keep things cordial and not die.
5 minutes into my first night watch I think I see something behind the boat, but too dark to tell so shine a light on it and sure enough we're dragging some piece of white crap behind us. I tell the captain and he shuts down the engine (we're not under sail yet, still in shipping lanes so stay on motor for more maneuverability). I feel great, I'm on watch so its obviously not me who has to go deal with it. Leah gets her snorkel out and then just starts whimpering saying she doesn't want to get in. We make a deal that if she takes half my watch, I'll hop in and deal with it. I strap on a safety rope, grab a flashlight, jump in, take a breath and go under to check things out. 10 seconds later I'm back on deck with rope in hand, and just bought myself an extra 1.5 hours to go sleep. Win win.
The storms come and go, I've really been appreciating watching lightning creep up on us. There's such a big difference between warm water rain and cold water rain, so I really don't mind much getting wet out here. We're stuck in Kumai for a few days, waiting for weather to look favorable to head out again across the southern portion of the island and up the eastern coast. Coming in was pretty awesome, we saw maybe a hundred lions mane jellyfish which are bigger than a basketball. Also a few seasnakes that I guess are lethal, but their fangs are way in the back of their throat so not much of a danger to humans. Today we're going up river into the jungle to see what the area is famous for, will come back with more pics of that.
Also for randomly cool photos, the captain does mostly underwater photography and this is his site. Some beautiful **** in there.
http://www.chphotographic.com/
I guess I haven't updated anything from last month in Bali. Gf came to visit and we did a bunch of stuff. Was great being with her and we stayed busy checking out different places, I surfed a decent amount. Will likely end up back in Bali when this sailing trip is over, for lack of any better idea, I still have 2 surfboards there, and its a good place to be. Utterly surprised there aren't more grindhouses setup there.