Bali to Belitung

Eighteen days and 670 miles ago, we left from Bali. 

Not before passing a pleasant day with driver, Bli – his enthusiastic but limited English was so much better than my Bahasa.  We’d hired Bli for basic provisioning – agreed to pay him 500,000 rupiah, about $41 Canadian – to take us around for a major grocery run and re-filling our diesel jerrycans. 

We don’t normally carry a back-up diesel supply, but it’s absolutely essential in our current predicament – travelling northwest in northwesterly monsoon season – relentless into-the-wind motoring conditions.  We’re grateful if we can fill our sails every now and then, just to give the engines a little boost. But, no doubt about it, we’re relying on our engines this season.

But there would be more to errand day than just the errands.  On Bli’s initiative, no extra charge, he took us to visit the enchanting tourist town of Lovina, some 2 hours away.  We shared lunch with him on the beach, before he took us on a detour to a spectacular Balinese Buddhist temple and monastery high up in the nearby hills of Banjar.  Pretty sure he asked if we’d like to do that, and undoubtedly I said Yes please – but lost in translation and somehow it all came as a surprise!  An unexpectedly full day, productive and pleasant. 

The tranquility of the ashram was contagious.

As we prepared to leave Bali, I felt as I often do on these sailing journeys.  Coulda’ stayed so much longer – so much more to see!

But a “good weather window” beckoned – the promise of light winds for the next three days.  We’re not always looking for light, but when the wind is in your face, less is definitely more. Three days should give us lots of time in decent conditions to motor, in daylight hours only, up and over the east and north coasts of Java.  Even without any sail-assist, after three full-day passages, we should make safe harbour on south shore of Bawean Island.  From there, we’d wait for the next window to traverse the Java Sea to Borneo.  

OK, Captain. Righto, let’s go!  We’d leave next day at first light.

Whoa, hang on, not so fast, sailor!  Pre-dawn, engines started, headsets donned – but just then, we discover a problem with our electric winch. That’s the big one that pulls the mainsail up the mast – and No, it’s not just a luxury.  If I should need to winch Bill up the mast for any reason – and it does happen! – I don’t have the strength to manage it manually.  So, we don’t leave home without the electric winch, not if we can help it! 

How did we discover the winch problem at the very last minute, just before we slipped the mooring? Well, sometimes, even before we set out, we raise the mainsail right there in the harbour, just up to the first notch.  This way, we’re ready to grab some wind in a close-reach if it happens to shift around favourably during the passage. In this NW monsoon season and our steady northwesterly direction, the wind angle will never shift enough for us to kill the engines completely – unfortunately. But if we can squeeze an extra 1 or 2 kts of power out of our sails, we’ll take it.    

As it turned out, the culprit was a bit of rust on a fuse holder – not even a faulty fuse, just a rusty fuse holder – doesn’t take much!  It all matters, little things matter.  But it did take four hours and a boatload of patience to figure it all out and get it working again.  Fortunately, we have time on our side.  And more fortunately, our Bill is a patient man!

As we leave the comfort of the Bay, hours behind schedule, we’re already pushing our luck to get around the end of Madura Island in daylight hours. Pretty critical because it’s FAD-infested around there, and the jury’s out whether the FADs in these Java waters are lit at night.   But sometimes, two wrongs make a right.  The wind picks up, double the forecast, on the nose as promised, and we’re really struggling, falling further behind.  We have a solution for that – we call it a day! 

Just 3 hours and 20 miles out, we find a sweet overnight anchorage on the east coast of Java, along the uninhabited eastern shore of Baluran National Park.  In the shadow of the Baluran volcano, not a soul for miles and miles.  The quietude is so pure, so vast – but softly interrupted, frequently, every few minutes, by yet another large sea turtle surfacing and then diving within metres of our boat. 

A turtle head – a big head, not unlike mine or yours – pops out of the water – stealthily, almost soundlessly. In the poor light under an overcast sky, her head looks like a floating bowling ball. Near to our boat, two metres away, she holds still there for just a few seconds. I want to see her cute face, but she’s always looking away. Then follows a soft round splooshing sound, as her large shell barely breaks the surface and she disappears below, leaving her turtle-imprint shimmering on the calm surface of the water. Repeat over and over – the turtles keep us company through the night and into the morning. Leatherbacks, we think – but could be Greens or Hawksbills – all native to these waters.

In the morning light, we handily get around the FAD-fest at the east end of Madura Island. But, as the day wears on, good anchoring options don’t present themselves. We decide to continue on into the night.  It turns into a 36-hour overnight passage all the way to Bawean Island.  The WNW wind angle has just enough north in the wind to let us motorsail much of the way, but it keeps us on a westerly course, parallel and quite close to the north coast of Java. 

Lights shine faintly through the mist – FADs and fishing boats, neither showing up on AIS, lots of traffic.  Not just traffic.  Oil rigs and pipelines, distribution platforms too.  The moon was quite full but nonetheless unhelpful. Overcast sky and misty conditions provided poor visibility at best. It was made worse somehow by the pale moonlight, washing out the already-dim hazards. That night, I think I’d’ve preferred the darkness of a new moon.  Night watch log entry: pea soup, pale lights, not on AIS, hard to see, very unpleasant.  Worst watch ever.

Before sunrise, we’re able to turn to starboard, northbound away from Java and into the Java Sea, onto a port tack – enough west in the wind to keep us motorsailing. Open water now, and fewer hazards. Daybreak coming. We make a B-line for Bawaen.

The next leg involved completing the crossing of the Java Sea to Kalimantan, the Indonesia portion of Borneo.  Another “good weather window”, so we set out promptly the very next morning.  We’d had a good rest overnight at anchor on the south side of Bawean Island, but we had to seize the day – never even set foot ashore. 

Another 36-hour overnight passage to Kumai River.  Stronger winds than predicted – of course! – but thankfully the sea-state remained quite comfortable.  The way the northwesterlies blow through the Java Sea, relentless at this time of year, you’d expect a tumultuous crossing with huge pointy waves – but not so!  Nothing more than a metre high, round and steady.  But we’re pretty much straight into it – so Turtlebones adopts a rocking horse rhythm – bow to stern, up and down, up and down, repeat, hours on end.  A bit tedious but could’ve been a lot worse this time of year.

We could motorsail most of the way.  Nice enough, but not without casualty.  Shifting winds took a toll on our headsail – big horizontal tear in our genoa, later repaired (badly) in Kumai River.

Tons of boat traffic in the Java Sea – cargo ships, tug boats, some pulling huge coal barges hundreds of metres long and hundreds of metres behind.  Tricky at night, the tug is lit and on AIS, but the barge isn’t.  Lots of fishing boats, lit but no AIS – hard to tell their speed or direction.  Some of them insist on approaching quite closely.  Harmless, but creepy. 

We arrived at the estuary of the Kumai River early afternoon.  Entry is not for the faint of heart.  Its shallow sandbar demands careful navigation.  Busy busy waterway – two large passenger ferries constantly move up and down the river, and countless ships, tankers, tugs and barges anchor in the river to load and offload their cargo – palm oil is a biggie, but much much more.  Sails down, we motored carefully up the shallow river.  We got lucky, on our arrival, the tide was already high and still coming up.  A strong incoming tidal current carried us comfortably upstream. 

Without doubt, the main attraction for us in Kumai River are the orangutans – one of the five great ape species – we humans being another one of the five. But unlike us, orangutans are critically endangered. Native exclusively to Indonesia – Borneo and Sumatra, to be precise – we jump at the chance to see them in their habitat – their diminishing habitat. We’re here to take a 3-day riverboat tour along the Sekonyer River, into the Borneo jungle, to visit the orangutan sanctuary and Camp Leakey research station. Huge success, aabsolutely amazing! But I’ll stop there – in another post, Bill will have lots to say about our jungle tour and our encounters with the orangutans and other magnificent creatures.

When we finally leave Kumai River, we catch the afternoon ebb tide that carries us nicely downstream.  Back to the Java Sea, we set out on a 48-hour passage due west to Belitung, picking our way along the south coast of Borneo, across the Karimata Strait, and along the south coast of Belitung.  Surprisingly shallow on this long passage.  Offshore ocean crossings typically involve depths measured in the hundreds or thousands of feet, even tens of thousands.  Not here, not in the Karimata Strait between the Java and South China Seas.  Here the depths measure in the tens – just tens of feet deep – sometimes less than 40 feet.  

So, in just 27 feet of water, I was momentarily terrified to see dark patches ahead. Are we coming up on a coral reef or a sandbar? How can it be, out here, 50 miles from the nearest shore? Are we about to crash onto a shoal? Do shoals even exist out here in the middle of the sea? On my watch, as Bill naps below, am I going to preside over major damage to our hull? In a panic, I hurry back to cut the engines, to steer clear, to manage our fateful impact. But then I immediately realize my folly – the dark patches are merely shadows of the clouds above! I had a really good laugh. All by myself, in the middle of nowhere.

Now we’ve arrived at Belitung. After a long and pleasant passage, we approached the anchorage on the south side of the island, just as yet another dark sky greeted us on arrival.

What a squall! It came up, seemingly out of nowhere – weirdly strong winds from the southwest – just as we arrived at the anchorage that we’d chosen to hide from northerlies!

We decided to wait it out before approaching the shore which involved dodging many rocky hazards. Just then, to make matters more interesting, our starboard engine / prop was disabled with a shake, rattle n’ roll. Had we snagged a fishing net in our prop? Not a great way to enter a foreign harbour – we certainly don’t want to damage to our boat gear, any more than we want to damage the fishing nets that local fishers need to earn a living.

We wouldn’t know for a few days what had happened to our starboard propeller. The water here is so murky, you can’t see what’s going on down there. Tin mining, both legal and illegal, both on land and sea, is the dominant industry on the Bangka and Belitung islands. Decades, even centuries, of tin mining has left a legacy of kalong on shore – abandoned water-filled pits, hazardous with heavy metal content, the remains of abandoned open-pit mines. Over 12,000 kalongs leave their scar on more than 15,000 hectares of island landscape – with no real requirement for, or hope of, reclamation. We suspect that responsibility for the milky water lies in hazardous run-off from the kalongs. Or perhaps the direct result of water-based tin mining operations – in these parts, tin is also mined from the ocean floor on specially designed platforms.

The water looks nice enough from a distance, but there is almost zero visibility. Even up close, with a mask and snorkel, we couldn’t see what had fouled our starboard prop. It was only by getting down there in the water and feeling around blindly that Bill could tell that our prop was indeed fouled with a mass of tangled material. It felt like a fishing net, and he dove down to cut it away, albeit blindly. Only when he hauled it up, it was revealed to be a large woven plastic bag, shredded into a tangled mess. AKA garbage. Fouled by garbage.

Waste management infrastructure is sorely missing in this country. There is a LOT of garbage in Indonesian waters, especially in rainy season. We’re lucky that this was our first encounter. And luckier yet that it happened in daylight, in an anchorage.

Notwithstanding the kalongs and the murky water, it’s a beautiful place. Doesn’t look tropical at all. All this granite. Looks more like Georgian Bay than anything we’ve ever seen this side of the equator!

The small Arumdalu Resort graces the beach. The shore looks otherwise uninhabited. No guests at the Inn this time of year. But the resort restaurant remains open and fully staffed, so we took advantage of our luck to enjoy a first-rate Valentines Day lunch.

We asked the maitre d’ about the white triangle perched on the rock out front, fully expecting to hear it’s a marker for incoming ships. But no, we’re surprised to learn, it’s a chapel. Turns out, the resort is an exotic wedding destination, and this little white triangle, made of woven plastic, is a simple but elegant solution to turn any space into a wedding venue – it’s lightweight, portable and non-denominational! Move it to the rock of your choice, drag it down your favourite stretch of beach, and that simple plastic cone marks the place for your solemn vows.

We’re the only restaurant guests in sight. No tourists on the island. And no sign of any company execs visiting the mines. And we haven’t seen a single other sailboat since we left Bali. Seems we have the entire Java Sea to ourselves.