Randal is hosing down our saltwater soaked carpet. For the too manyith time we have cruised with the port holes open and gotten spray into the boat. But I absolutely refuse to let it happen again! The problem is that closing the portholes makes the boat stuffy when you arrive at the end of your passage. The other problem is that it always seems so calm when we start out that we decide to just leave the portholes and hatches open. This last passage hopefully has finally shown us that a flat ocean at the anchorage you’re departing won’t predict the waves or swells you’ll encounter on the passage. The sound of crashing stuff down below is the reminder. Actually we do pack away most stuff really well. My art supplies have been displaced by stockpiles of beer and water. It would be really great to be able to totally empty the boat of everything and start over. First off I’d leave our heavy blankets and winter clothes at home. Although it can be cool enough for a light sweater at times, the heavy wool monsters we have stuffed in the spaces under the bed won’t be needed till we hit the Mediterranean in maybe 2010.

It used to be so easy to write up these emails home. First off, as quirky as it was, the Subic wifi worked most of the time. Now we are seeing just how super that quirky service was. We have suffered with the funky time cards in Puerto Galera. We added wifi antennae and that helped some times in Puerto Princessa and then in Kota Kinabalu. You would lose connection occasionally, but it was possible to use. With our cell phone connection you get connected occasionally. Our service now gives us 24 hours to use in 7 days. We still have over 16 hours left because we can’t stay connected long enough to actually do anything with it. The other choice was the pay as you go service. It went way too fast charging by bandwidth as well as time. It cost about $11 for about 4 hours. I followed a Sox game one morning and it might have cost as much as going to Fenway Park! So we changed to this 24 hour/7 day service which hardly works at all. I’m voting for the more expensive one that actually works. Hopefully there is a telkomsel office here in Bali.

The point of the wifi issue is that it gets hard to send email on a timely basis. And now we seem to be moving from place to place so often that it’s hard to take it all in and remember whom we met where and did what with! We joined up with Sail Indonesia in Labuanbajo though we arrived on the last day of the official visit. Most boats were gone, but we did meet one couple and their 2 and 7 month old son Jack. Jack talks up a storm and is adorable. When we moved on to Rinca, Canadian Greg from Cherokee dinghyed over to our boat asking if we felt he was anchoring too close to us. We said he was fine and he stayed to chat. From that we joined him and 2 other boats of folks who had linked up previously and all did the tour of Rinca Island, Happy Hour, a passage to North Komodo, Happy Hour. You get the picture. I might be a good enough sailor for this group, but I’m not sure I’m a good enough partier. We moved on from North Komodo to Teluk Bantatu. There was one sailboat and one tiny house on the island. The sailboat, Lavina is owned by Peter and Ula from Sweden. They came to visit and told us no one lived in the cute little house on the island. We had an impromptu Happy Hour. We moved on the next morning for Mataram. There we met Kai and Maryanne from Nabob. They are from Sweden also. We spent most of our time at Mataram with them, one day joining with 16 others for a day at Gili Air an island resort area. Then next day we hired a car and the 4 of us went to Mataram city to provision. Everyone has been very friendly and welcoming. When we arrived in Mataram Randal got on the VHF radio and addressed all of the boats at anchor telling them who we are and that we hoped to start meeting them. We were immediately invited to join with the group going for the day to Gili Air so we did. It is a beautiful little island with beautiful clean perfect beaches and you can walk around the whole thing in less than 2 hours. Unless you stop along the way at a bar or two or three. And the small used book shop and the house on the island where the woman lives who cuts hair. So it took us many hours to walk around the island. There were pony carts if you needed. No cars because no roads! Just a dirt path that circles the island. The one feature of our anchorage that is most memorable is the calling to prayer several times each night and early each morning, including the 3 am call. I’m not sure if all of the public prayer over the loud, LOUD speakers was related to Ramadan. I do know that custom has people rising at 3 am to eat and pray before sunrise and the start of the day’s fast until sunset. The loudspeaker prayer did wake me, but it wasn’t so hard to fall asleep to as the karaoke in the Philippines every night.

Now we’re in Bali and Randal is preparing the fish he caught on our way to Mataram. Big fish. He lost his gaff getting the fish into the boat. Not because the fish was so big, but the gaff hadn’t been secured to its handle so off it went. But we have the fish. Maybe a mackerel. I do have a photo to prove this entire tale, big fish and gaff handle side by side on the deck.

My computer had a few bad days and wouldn’t come alive at all. But taking out the battery, unplugging the computer and giving it a day’s rest seems to have brought it back to life. Since my photos are all there, it would have been sad otherwise. I will send off more photos to Audrey to load on the website. It works better than trying to include so many in the email.

Audrey had worked really hard putting together our web site. Being unable to contact me easily made it a more complicated process. Luckily she is very patient and dedicated and my sister stepped in with “critiques” so things got done. Darlene Smithwick at the Roanoke County Public Library has been maintaining it these many years and Randal and I thank her enormously. But we decided it was time for a permanent place for our stuff so we have a site of our own now. www.mydoramac.com is the address if you don’t already know. When she finally gets the coordinates from us they will create the mapping section of the site. ANY DELAYS OR IMPERFECTIONS WITH THE SITE MUST BE BLAMED ON THE AUTHOR.!!!!!! NOT ON THE WEBMASTER. It’s true. Audrey has been heroic working to get the site up even with an extended stay in the US to help her mom. Audrey and Bob are our friends from Subic Bay. One of the things their company does is build and maintains web pages. Lucky us!!! And this way we can’t ever lose them!

I know I’m rambling, but the specifics are a bit murky after so much time. I will try to write again each day even if it’s a bit before I can send anything. At least it won’t seem like such a huge undertaking to catch up.

Both Randal and I enjoyed Makassar; but not the getting from the water taxi to the pier. Hopefully this photo is clear enough for you to see what I mea. There is a tiny man in white shirt on the pier so you can see how far down it is into the boats.

This is the pier in Makassar. The roof covering of the water taxi was almost as high as the pier. There was no ladder. Getting up was difficult, down dreadful and dreaded Randal literally had to haul me up. Getting down I had to just step into space half way down to the boat and hope someone caught me before I stepped off the boat into the water. I almost landed in the water one night. It was very low tide so the boat was further away than usual. I had put one foot onto something and the other foot had nowhere to go but down which was way too far to reach anything. I finally landed one foot on the boat with enough momentum to send me past the other edge of the bow. Luckily Randal had grabbed my arm to balance me or off I would have gone. One time we boarded from the shore and that was just as bad stepping on a bent piece of metal pipe with one foot and leaping from that onto the boat. Miss and you are in deep muck! But that was the only thing we didn’t like about Makassar. Everything else made us wish we could stay longer. I’m sending Audrey all of the photos so you can see them on the website. It will be a bit since I have to burn the cd and mail it. But eventually it will be there. Interesting, but not so different or scenic as Tana Toraja.

From Makassar we went to Labuanbajo bringing Petra and Janez with us. You have met them in an email. Labuanbajo was a bit like Puerta Galera without all the expats. But it was pretty and the people friendly.

Randal had secured our dinghy to the pier in Labuanbajo and was climbing out. Sometimes there are water taxi and sometimes you take your own dinghy. After the very difficult water taxi access in Makassar, this parking area was great. No one bothers the dinghy. I think that is mostly the case, everywhere anyway, but being part of Sail Indonesia probably is added security since everyone knows that’s why the “western” boats and dinghies are there.

Three examples of the roof decorations to keep away the evil spirits. We were first introduced to these on our tour of Tana Toraja but it must be common throughout Indonesia.

After Labuanbajo we went to Rinca Island.

The welcoming committee. You aren’t allowed to feed the monkeys so they don’t get dependent on handouts or become aggressive and grabby. Their eyes tell you how closely related we are to them making it hard not to take them seriously.

These guys on the other hand….. You took them seriously for a whole different reason. This guy was probably longer than me nose to tail. Probably outweighed me too. If you get bitten and it’s left untreated the bacteria can kill you. We saw the remains of a water buffalo. I like the monkeys better.

More in next email when I can