I’ve been sailing west for so long that I’ve woken up in the Far East. 

I’m awake early on my first morning in Indonesia, looking forward to exploring the town of Tual and trying some local food.

But first I have to clear boat and crew through Quarantine, Immigration, Customs and Port Control.  In that order.  

The best advice I was given for this mission was “Be patient, keep smiling”.

I was also told to wear long trousers, closed shoes and a long sleeved shirt, respecting those working in uniform.  By 8am it’s very hot.

The national language here is Bahasa Indonesia. While there are many regional languages across this huge country, ‘Bahasa’ is spoken everywhere.

It is said to be an easy language to learn, even for a non-gifted linguist like me.  The structure of Bahasa is nice and simple, with none of those verb endings and genders that have always plagued my Franglais.

So I have been doing a daily lesson on the language-learning app Duolingo. I’m enjoying it, but the first two weeks were centred around the eating of apples, drinking water, and a black cat that likes to drink milk.

All quite rewarding, the old grey matter can still absorb strange new things, but a bit limiting in terms of conversation. To these skills I added ‘thank you’ (Terima Kasih) which seemed to be very well received by the port officials.  A little Bahasa goes a long way, they say.  In my case it will need to.

The first hurdle was a quarantine inspection.  Having established that none of the crew had died since our last port, the friendly officer instructed us to lower the Q flag and hoist our courtesy flag.  “Welcome to Indonesia”.  

“Terima Kasih!”

At one point in that long, hot day I found myself in the back of a car with a customs officer driving back to the boat for our second inspection.  I thanked him in Bahasa. “Oh you speak Indonesian!”  This seemed to be going well, so I hit him with the news that the black cat likes to drink milk while I prefer to drink water. 

I’m not really sure if that helped but he quickly inspected my medicine chest and cocktail cabinet, took photos of the engines and produced clearance documents to be signed and stamped.  Years ago Dawn had a rubber stamp made with the boat name and a few official numbers on it: SSR, Call Sign, MMSI, looks pretty official.  This is definitely worth having when being processed through Indonesian bureaucracy.  Everyone loved it when I pulled out that self-inking rubber stamp and left my mark. They wanted it on every single document.  

For me the first real thrill of arrival was now that we were allowed out through the port gates into the town of Tual.

We had tied the dinghy to a coastguard ship and found our way to the crumbling concrete dock via a huge fender.

Then in to the bustling streets for a lunch of fish curry, rice, tempeh, egg, greens and weapons-grade sambal.  All for the price of a cup of tea in London.

We topped up our fruit and veg supplies, then one more hot hour of signing and rubber-stamping before we were street-legal, fully cleared in.  Escapade is free to roam these waters for three years!

And I’m back in shorts.

After all that we needed a day off.  We headed for the nearest turquoise anchorage and swam ashore to a white sandy beach.  There was a very low-key strip of shacks but we were able to find coffee, lunch, dinner and a karaoke hut.

This little girl seemed much more interested in the news about the cat and the milk.

After weeks of ukulele training, Alex’s conquest of ‘Let it be’ climaxed that night with a triumphant public performance through 1000W speakers with a bit of feedback.

Perhaps that inspired Arabella’s delivery of ‘Killing Me Softly (with his song)’.  

(Well it may only have killed her softly, but he totally murdered ‘Let it Be’)

Next stop was a remote lagoon that reminded me of the Tuamotus.  We had to sail round a pearl farm and through a narrow pass to find our spot.  A riot of blue water colours with dolphins frolicking.

The breeze arrived and foils were deployed for the afternoon.  

James traded coconuts for cold beers with a local fisherman.

Onwards. We decided to leapfrog a few islands due to lack of useful anchorages, so we set off on an overnight passage, aiming for the archipelago SE of Misool.

Our new standard Indonesian rig is full main and Big Red.  Day and night.  On this trip we barely touched a sheet for 30hrs as Escapade ate up 240 miles in a 10 knot breeze.

We caught a perfect size tuna, dinner for four.  The four of us are well adjusted to all this now.  The rhythm of the sailing and night watches seems easy.  The creaking mainsheet and the strumming of the uke.  Mile after mile.

My night watch was a starry sky and trails of phosphorescence streaming from the hulls as the boat sailed herself across the dark sea.

The next afternoon we were approaching our target island of Daram.  A pod of dolphins came to welcome us.

The next few days were a string of anchorages so scenic and so unlike anything I had ever seen, my memory of those places is all a bit dreamlike.  I think I’ll let the photos do the talking.

The water in this terrain seems to be too deep for anchoring or too shallow, so I had bought a 250m spool of 8mm nylon rope from a fisherman’s supplier in Cairns, we cut it into four lengths and strung ourselves between the islands.

We swam, snorkelled and towed foils around the glassy lagoons. It was very hot and calm.

Early one morning I was persuaded to climb this hill.

For this view.

These are whole archipelagos of limestone ’Karst’ islands fringed by coral reefs and emerging from deep dark lagoons.  The island systems are a labyrinth of channels, some of which are navigable, most of which don’t even appear on my plotter. Here’s my Mac pretending to be a chart plotter with one of Dawn’s glorious satellite images.  

This is the same course on our C-Map chart, which shows we sailed right across the dry island.

You could get lost in those waters for a whole season if you wanted to, and probably not see another yacht. 

But for us it’s northwards again, beyond Misool and the tradewinds, heading for the equator.

So the wind has finally deserted us.  Best part of 2000nm from Cairns and we’ve had sweet sailing almost all the way.

But now we’ve arrived in the doldrums and we have to be content with the 7 knots of apparent wind courtesy of a diesel engine.

One morning I was about to put a fishing line out but the wake looked so glassy and tempting I had to try foiling it.

No wind but we did find some little waves, a couple of promising spots we saw on Google Earth with reefs exposed to the North Pacific.

It was small but we had a week of chasing it on foils and longboards.

Some fun waves breaking on pristine reefs in bath-warm water.

Since it’s so calm, we have started to anchor within a short paddle of the surf.

The landscape is mainly uninhabited jungly hills.  Occasional islands and villages to visit.

The Equator.

It’s traditional to perform a line-crossing ceremony where first time Equator-crossers are ritually humiliated, heads shaved and covered in fish guts, for example.

As the only ’Shellback’ on board, it fell to me to perform this rite of passage. (As my daughter Jemima did for Dawn and I when we first crossed the line in Galapagos)

King Neptune made a surprise appearance to oversee the proceedings.

I toned down the traditional trial a bit.  Our version included cleansing with ‘the waters of the south’ and drinking ‘of the fruits of the land’.  Which meant a  bucket of seawater over the head and a shot of tequila to smooth our path between hemispheres.

We counted down the seconds of latitude and swam across the line.

Then it was time for my wonderful crew to fly away.  It feels like they have helped me deliver Escapade from one world to another.  Cairns seems an awfully long way back in our wake now. 

Thanks for everything team, I look forward to reciprocating on Alex and Arabella’s Outremer one day!