We will always remember the 2,000 miles and seven weeks cruise up the Australian east coast and over the top to Darwin as being a stressful passage. The waters inside the Great barrier Reef are shallow and for the most part, murky, strewn with numerous reefs, rocks, sandbars, and numberless islands and islets. Add to that almost constantly strong southeast wind and the presence of estuarine crocodiles, the latter fact which certainly discourages one from diving, all made this a less than enjoyable trip. It is true that the territory is beautiful, but we had lingered so long on our land tour by auto, enjoying the wonders of the Australian outback, that we began our trip rather late in the season and had to push pretty hard to get to Darwin before our Australian visitors visas expired. The wind was always from the southeast and made the entire passage a starboard tack run for us. But clipping along over shallow bays of unknown (to us) waters at seven knots with the depth meter showing 2 to 3 meters of water is not relaxing.
The trip began badly on a Tuesday morning when an endplate on our heat exchanger cracked only a couple of hours north of Brisbane. Nancy awoke from a nap to find the main cabin floorboards awash with suspiciously warm seawater. We went through a horrible couple of hours until we had the boat bailed out, found the leak and truly believed we were not sinking. There is an old nautical joke that goes, "There is no pump as good as a scared man with a bucket!". We proved the accuracy of this saying and Neil will not forget the long hours of feeling the adrenalin dissipating in his circulatory system. We hove to offshore through the squally night for some patchy sleep and sailed early next morning a short distance up the Mooloolaba River and managed to smoothly come to an unassisted landing under sail at an end-tie berth at the Mooloolaba Yacht Club. We were so proud to have made it safely to port for repairs under sail alone in 15 knots of wind on the beam.
Mooloolaba turned out to be a great place to break down. Not only were there excellent repair and chandlery facilities all within easy walking distance of the marina, but there was also a great take-out seafood place called Brown's which had the most delicious school prawns and cooked crab, ready to go. We will not forget an interesting fellow behind the busy counter who showed us "how real Australians eat prawns, mate!" by popping the whole thing into his mouth, head, shell and all, and begin crunching with the long red feelers hanging out of his mouth! A passing waitress said, "Oh Ernie, are you at it again?" as she wiped the dangling feelers away from his chin. He always managed to give us more product than we paid for and made us feel right at home. Australians were so very good to us everywhere we traveled. Each evening we were in Mooloolaba our supper consisted of a kilo or more of cooked prawns or crab and a couple of rum and coke drinks in the cockpit, . . . nothing else and it was a great supper! We left Mooloolaba with our engine and heat exchanger in much better shape than new and with a new bilge alarm installed.

We made our way up the coast, mostly making 40, 50, even 60 nm day hops, not wanting to sail at night in unfamiliar coastal waters. We made overnight passages only two or three times. We found good anchorages to be rather far apart, and we stayed in some pretty marginal places. When we got to MacKay, we wound up staying in the marina there for six nights, waiting for a blustery spell of weather to pass over us. We effected many minor repairs and upgrades to Active Light, taking a commuter bus often into town for shopping. As we worked our way north, through the beautiful Whitsunday Islands, the Australian coastal terrain became flatter and more arid. The Great Barrier Reef presses closer and closer in toward shore as you get go north and the viable passage in between gets narrower. We often anchored for the night in the lee of a simple offshore sandy atoll with only a couple of palm trees on it. We also made stops at Bowen, Townsville, and Cairns. In the Townsville Marina, we had the remarkably good fortune to meet Brenda and Ashley aboard Ashimycayenne, a couple who had cruised with Noel and Litara Barrott back in the 1970's on Sina's first circumnavigation. Neil is writing a biography of that couple and their travels.

Captain James Cook was in these same waters in 1770 in the Endeavour, eventually becoming trapped inside the encroaching reefs. One cannot but marvel at his sailing and navigation skills. We were kept on our toes in spite having aboard most of every modern navigational convenience; GPS interfacing with electronic charts on our shipboard computer(s), telling us exactly where each and every reef and sandbar lay, and where we with in relation to that within 10 yards, a radar, knotmeter, depthfinder, accurate compasses, and good daily weather reports. Cook had no charts and only a man in the lee scuppers with a lead line for depth information. These lacks, combined with the clumsy windward performance of his square-rigged vessel and the closeness of the reef must have made the most maddening difficulties for the man. After running aground and holing his vessel on a reef, he made it back to the mainland shore for repairs only because the jagged spear of coral which had punctured the Endeavour's hull had broken off and somewhat slowed the waters ingress. He had to jettison all his cannon to get off the reef. While repairs were being made, he and a small crew sailed out to Lizard Island in the Endeavour's launch to try to find a passage to deep, clear water. From the peak of Lizard Island he spied Cook's Passage. It is an awesome sight to look out over these shallow, turquoise waters on a clear day. The sand bars and reefs stand out pretty well. Another clearly visible break in the fringing reef lies nearby to the south, but the approach to this pass is blocked by sandbars showing as varying shades of white and pale green in the clear water. We tried to imagine ourselves sailing here in Active Light without all the mod-cons and information we possess, and just a teeny, tiny bit, we may have had an inkling of how Cook felt standing here. In the very informal logbook for visitors, really just a journal sealed in a piece of plasticware near the commemorative monument, one admiring German yachtie has written, "Captain Cook was a STUD!". We agreed.

Sighting along Cook's Passage atop Cook's Look on Lizard Island.

The water is clear out here so close to the outer reef at Lizard Island.

We stayed several days at Lizard Island. The wind was howling each day, but we were well protected on the northern side of the island. We hiked all over the island, visited the marine research station, and rested. We pushed on up the coast, spending Nancy's birthday anchored in the Escape River, just south of Cape York, the top end of Australia's east coast. We kept looking for crocodiles napping on the banks of the river, as reported by other yachties on the morning SSB net, but we saw none. We breathed a vast sigh of relief as we rounded Cape York, gybing over onto a port tack and turning west to open and relatively deep water. One night's rest in a delightful little anchorage called Seisia (Bamaga), an Aboriginal settlement, and we headed out over the Gulf of Carpentaria, past the Wessel Islands, and on into Darwin.
In Darwin we found what must be the world's best yacht club. The Darwin Sailing Club has very active youth and adult sailing programs, with races every week and sail training by a large hired staff every morning during the dry season. They offer to cruisers free mail pickup, showers, coin-op laundry, and use of the clubhouse and bar. Anyone can join the club as a full member for one trial month at no charge. The setting is so attractive and the restaurant so excellent that it is often packed by townspeople for lunch and dinner. There is a good chandlery on the premises and even a tidal grid where we beached Active Light and had a good washdown, bottom scrub and repaint, and switched out the zinc anodes, all for a blazing US$18 and a hard day's work. We have never had a more gentle "haulout" nor more pleasant stay than in this large shallow bay. Perhaps the only downside of it all was that the tidal range is so great, sometimes seven meters(!) and the bay so shallow, that we had a pull of one nautical mile to get ashore in our dinghy. It was nice, though, rowing past all the many interesting boats at anchor. We find ourselves a bit of an oddity out here, in that almost all the other cruisers have "rubber floaty things" with an outboard attached to ferry them ship to shore. Those rubber floaty things (they are not boats!) do serve well, however, as superior diving platforms and also serve well as soft fenders for our hard dinghy at the dock.

After a week in Fannie Bay, however, our British friends, Maureen and Peter, aboard Another Bold Venture were able to get us into the locked Cullen Bay Marina for two weeks at a very reasonable rate. This greatly facilitated our extensive provisioning for Indonesia. Our duty free liquor purchases were even delivered right to the boat on a hand truck. Once again, Australians were so nice to us, fishermen giving us huge fish steaks and free beer and even a bottle of chilled wine.
We have sometimes mentioned the amazing sailing couple, Noel and Litara Barrott, whom we had met while in Whangarei, New Zealand. This couple built two wonderful wooden boats and have circled the globe via all the great capes twice! We were so impressed by their accomplishments that Neil has taken on the onerous task of assembling a biography of their travels. While in Cullen Bay, we had the distinct pleasure of meeting Litara's sister, Ter'lua, and her family. Ter'lua came down to Active Light for tea and a long talk one morning and later invited us to her home for a huge and lavish barbecue. Her husband, Bas, and all the members of her family were so very kind and generous to us. Noel's son, Walter, named after his great grandfather, also lives in Darwin with his son and family. We regret very much not being able to meet this handsome and remarkable young man about whom we have heard so many positive things from everyone we have talked to, but there was not enough time before our visas required us to leave Australia. Incidentally, there is a link on our home page to Noel and Litara's website.

We did not know that by leaving Australia we would also be leaving almost all our wind behind. Our travels throughout Indonesia and Malaysia were mostly by motoring. We have put more hours on our new Kubota engine this season than in any of the previous four years. Where we once filled our 55 gallon tank once a year (!), we now top up in every marina, and we make certain we have enough diesel to motor all the way to the next known fuel stop. There are no consistent good winds in this area of the globe.
We anchored off the little town of Kupang, our entry port and made it through the entry procedure by doling out the expected amounts of rupiah, that is what customs, quarantine, and immigration is all about. There was no inspection of boat, no concern to see health cards, just outstretched hands for the money. We cannot blame them, these people are terribly, terribly poor and have a standard of income far below the average cruiser's. We were aghast to see young kids and grown men picking through our (disgusting) garbage bags we brought ashore, looking for anything they could use. We made a tour of the local open market and Neil began trying to learn the Bahasa language, used throughout Indonesia and Malaysia.

We made a couple of trips by taxi into Maumere, did our internet duties, bought a Bahasa language dictionary, had a good meal of nasi campur (rice with various meats), and enjoyed shopping for whatever there was. Dan and Neil found one store with about three cases of tonic water in cans. Neil found another which sold excellent graphite-loaded 1/4" packing gland hemp for our propeller shaft at about a dollar per meter. He bought two meters, enough to last us around the world twice!

Through the efforts of Sal, we hired a car and driver and took off one morning quite early to see the three deep multicolored lakes of Kelimutu, located in the craters of old volcanoes in the highland mountains of Flores. The day we chose to go turned out to be a rainy one, so we never did see the water at the bottom of the craters. But somehow that did little to dampen our enjoyment of the trip. It was so good to get inland and see hills, little villages and the lush green foliage everywhere. Flores is a very mountainous island. There were numerous small waterfalls rushing down the mountainsides, lots of rice fields etched into steep valleys, and very interestingly contrived irrigation systems to feed them.

One thing we did not particularly enjoy throughout Indonesia was the manner in which many vendors would press you to buy their wares, often thrusting carvings into your hands, as if daring you to drop it or refuse them. We realize this condition is fostered by their relative poverty and their enthusiam to sell their items at the highest possible price, and they often succeed! And we have so very much wealth in comparison. One can hardly blame them for being a bit pushy in their sales approach.

Back at Sea World, we paid the driver, tipped the fellows well, and said our goodbyes to Sal. A day later we continued westward across the top end of Flores, stopping each night at a pleasant anchorage. At the town of Labuan Bajo, on the western tip of Flores, we bought several strings of rather rough pearls, "Baroque" pearls they are called, from vendors in outrigger canoes. We did not leave our boat to go ashore there. On the morning SSB radio net one German cruiser reported his camera and laptop stolen from his boat when he went ashore for ice and a meal at night. Our goal was to see the famous komodo dragons on the nearby islands of Rindja and Komodo, so we motored next morning to a quiet anchorage on the northeast corner of Rindja Island.

We paid our park entrance fees, our anchoring fees, camera fees, and a tour guide fee, all of which amounted to perhaps US$10, at the park ranger's office and had a wonderful afternoon walk over the north end of the island, just Dan, the two of us, and the guide. We saw many of the big monitor lizards lounging about in the shade beneath the houses built on stilts at the ranger station, waiting for their evening feed. On the walk we saw monkeys, wild game cocks, water buffalo, and a peculiar small "barking" deer. 

We learned a lot from our ranger guide about the Komodo dragons. Their population is certainly no longer endangered, there are over three thousand of them protected on this island alone. They are pretty effective, if unpleasant, hunters. They lie in ambush, well camouflaged, until a water buffalo comes near enough to bite. The saliva in their mouths contain a virulent bacteria which festers in the wound until the beast is weakened. The big lizard will follow the buffalo for days until he is weak enough to bite again and again. When he finally dies, the smell attracts dragons from miles around and there ensues a regular row about who gets the next bite. Everything is eaten, even the skull and bones are swallowed. You can see the results of this in the very white, calcium-laden dried dragon droppings on the trails. Several locals, often children, and one Swiss tourist have been eaten in past years. Only the camera and eyeglasses were left from the tourist meal. The fellow was a photographer and had strayed away from his guide on Komodo Island. He got too close the his subject. We wonder how his photos turned out? These  are big critters, often weighing 300 pounds and stretching to 10 feet in length. They can live 100 years.

These islands are hilly and rather dry in this season (September). One needs to be pretty self-contained touring here as there are no places to reprovision, no banks nor post offices, no water to take on, no diesel depot.  We moved over to Komodo Island and anchored in front of the park ranger's station. We all went ashore but only the Active Light crew signed up for a tour through the park. We were the only customers and our guide was an excellent young Muslim lad from eastern Java who spoke pretty good English. We saw no more Komodo dragons, but we enjoyed the walk and had the guide all to ourselves, so we were able to ask all the questions we wanted.
Next morning we weighed anchor and began the two night passage to Bali, passing south beneath Sumba, Sumbawa, and Lombok islands. We will always remember this passage because we planned our approach to Bali poorly and struggled for hours against a strong current flooding south out of the Lombok Strait.

This colorful boat with dual shaft drive engines passed us going in to Bali.

We began to see the famous and colorful long tail boats as we neared Bali. These are propelled by a long direct drive propeller shaft extended from an engine, usually gasoline, which pivots from a mount on the gunwale. These engines are far cheaper and more numerous than the standard outboard motor. They can be improvised from any lawnmower-type engine, and some of them are quite large. They are also easy to pivot out of the water for maneuvering over and around nets. They are often completely unmuffled and quite loud, hence the local name, klotok. Some larger boats even have two mounted on the gunwales.
We put into the decrepit old Bali International Marina. The water the marina sits in is really foul and the place, once elegant, is quite run down and appears as if no money had been invested in maintenance for ten years or more. The marina berth rates were quite up to western standards, however. Nevertheless, we found lots of old friends and acquaintances there and had a wonderful time touring Bali.
Just inside the gates to the marina awaits a cluster of rather pushy taxi drivers, more or less controlled by an man named Niko. These fellows pounce on tourists immediately as you exit the club and charge higher rates to take the  unknowing into Denpasar. We had a bad experience with them right away when they took both us and the Corleys in to the Bali National Museum on a day when everyone but us knew the museum was closed.

Neil in his required temple visit sarong.

We made several short trips to local temples and a attended a traditional Balinese dance and music performance. Nancy and Marian visited a batik factory. We spent lots of pleasant evenings having dinner and parties with friends at the marina restaurant. Neil even managed to find musicians to play with on two evenings during the three weeks we were there. We remember the restaurant owner and his wife being particularly welcoming and helpful.

We all sat down one morning with Dick McCune, the marina manager, and planned a four-day excursion into the interior.We hired a driver/guide through one of the marina staff members recommended by Dick, but when the driver arrived to pick us up on the morning of our excursion, he was harassed by Niko's taxi mafia waiting inside the marina compound. We don't really know if our driver had no license to take tourist around Bali on tours or if the group of drivers in front of the marina resented someone else horning in on what they considered their customers, but for some reason we were chased at considerable speed through the streets of Benoa by a fellow on a motorcycle who kept motioning for our driver, who was very nervous and sweating profusely, to pull over and stop. We were all bouncing around in the back end of the SUV, not understanding a thing about what was happening. Marian, who loves cheap thrills, :-)  was enjoying every moment of the chase. Our driver was babbling constantly about the "bad men" back at the marina who were out to get him because they wanted to control all the tourist business. We eventually eluded the fellow on the motorbike, or he just gave up the chase, and suffered about two more hours of non-stop nervous banter from our driver about the "bad men" and his alleged innocence. But things soon settled down and we began to actually enjoy our trip as we got farther away from the marina. Other than the driver experience, we found Dicks' advice about where to go and what to see to be invaluable. We had a great trip!

We stopped at numerous Hindu temples and wood carving and batik factories as we slowly made our way through green countryside toward the town of Ubud, about 30 kilometers inland. There were lots of rice fields under constant cultivation. It is always good to see green fields and trees after so much time at sea. We were especially impressed by the very large teak carving and furniture factories, filled with tons of the most elaborate statues, icons, and furniture. We wished we had the money to buy and ship lots of it back home. The prices are very reasonable. The Balinese, though devote Hindus, are not a straitlaced people. We found some humorous sexual innuendo displayed in both their dance performances and in these teak carvings. Many of these carvings were really beautiful, but a great deal of it, though well-carved, we found to be heavy, overly-ornate, and even garish.

It turns out that our driver was no stranger to these parts. He supported himself solely as a driver and tourist guide. He was fairly knowledgeable about local customs, spoke labored but passable English, and was a pretty decent fellow. But it seems like every restaurant he took us to, every factory and temple we visited, he arranged some "special discount" from the proprietor. After a while we began trying to let him know we didn't want to visit any more temples and we didn't like eating always in the most expensive restaurants. It took about a day for this idea to take root in his mind. At each stop, we were met by local vendors who would encourage you to buy from only them, We suppose if you look like tourists, and go to the places the tourists go, then you get treated like a tourist.
In Ubud, we stayed at the Rice Paddy Bungalows, a place recommended to us by another cruiser, and we found the place so delightful we stayed two nights. Complete with tea and breakfast served on our own private patio, bamboo walls and furniture, ceiling fan, and resident gecko, it was a great stop. Nancy, Marian, and Dana walked the streets of Ubud, shopping their little hearts out while Neill and Dan "worshipped at the Bintang temple", a code phrase for having a local Bintang beer at a sidewalk cafe.

Next day we set out driving north from Ubud. Our goal was to see the locally famous volcanic crater and lake at Gunung Batur. We stopped at a spice plantation to see coffee, cocoa, jackfruit, curry and all sorts of exotic spices being processed. 

We all had lunch on a terrace overhanging the crater's rim and started back down mountain afterwards. We visited the last of our temples, this one was the oldest and second largest, or perhaps the largest and second oldest in Bali. It was a good one, but they all began to look pretty much the same to us and we refused to visit any more temples. This was puzzling to our driver because he could not figure out what to do with us.

Road traffic was halted on our way back to Ubud by the longest and most beautiful temple offering processional we have ever seen. The line of beautifully dressed ladies, all with baskets of food on their heads must have stretched for two hundred meters. Both Dan and Neil got out of the car and ran ahead to catch them as they turned left down toward a temple. Back in Ubud, we literally fell exhausted into our rooms. Revived by late tea, we ventured out in the night for supper, and of course, more fabric shopping.

We do not pretend to understand Balinese burial rituals, but we were intrigued by the several shallow graves we saw along the roadside and the hanging baskets, like mailboxes, as we drove past some villages. As best we could understand from our driver's lengthy explanation, is that Bali's principal religion is a variation of Hinduism that incorporates Polynesian religious rites. The bodies of beloved family members are temporarily buried or cremated in anticipation of a large and expensive mass cremation ceremony. The ashes of the departed are carried in a long procession to the sea and scattered on the water. This is followed by several days of feasting. Money is the operant factor here. The ceremonies are so expensive that village members wait until there are quite a few others to share in the costs.

On the morning of our third day, with an ominous censure to our driver from all of us of "No more temples! No more tourist restaurants!", we set out toward the Sidemen valley and the tiny village perched therein, as per Dick's recommendation. We passed more rural scenes, more terraced rice fields, and generally left the tourist crowds behind. Our driver tried to discourage us from going to Sidemen, saying there was no place to stay there and no place to eat. To refute his claims, we began to make up pretend places as we read from the Lonely Planet guidebook, like "In central Sidemen, internet access can be had both at the public library and in Wayan's Cafe, across the street from the Safeway supermarket, located adjacent to the municipal auditorium and sports complex." He would shake his head and say that people in Sidemen had never heard of a library.
It turned out that there really was no town at all, just a couple of family fruit stands and four or five rural guest houses, all of which offer overnight stays with tea, dinner, and breakfast included. We chose one perched on a hillside overlooking a vast terraced rice field with Mount Agung in the near background. It was beautiful. I think we spent all our time while there sitting under our private gazebo. It hung out over the road overlooking the fields below. We watched oxen plowing the flooded rice fields as both men and women planted seedlings and pulled weeds as the afternoon and morning shadows crept slowly across this green land. It was our favorite spot.

There are many different words for rice depending on its stage of growth.

Rice field workers from our lodge.

Our room in Sidemen.

Tea time at the gazebo.

Neil reads and ponders the meaning of life.

Nancy, Neil, and Dan after breakfast next morning.

Oxen plowing the rice terraces.

Nancy thinking about Shawna and her expected grandchild.

Our room had a four-poster bed draped with mosquito netting, huge hand-carved teak furniture, a cold tile bathroom, ceiling fan again, resident geckos again and neither screens nor glass in the windows. We enjoyed our time there so much and wished we could have stayed on for a week.

Moving on next morning we made our way slowly back to Denpasar. We stopped to talk with an old fellow and his daughter who had been out cutting leafy greens for sale in the market. We paused for photos of several schools, some of the students and teachers on recess walking bravely right up to our car to say hello.

As we neared the Makro supermarket close to the marina, our starting point, our driver started worrying again about the problems he had at the marina, we took another taxi back instead. A week later, the whole incident was just another colorful memory between the Corleys and the Sirmans. 

We began to take on bottled water and diesel fuel for the trip to Kalimantan. We all wanted to see the orangutans in the wild. After several days prep, several more evenings ashore having dinner and one great birthday party with our friends, we paid our marina bill and headed north against the always south-setting current in the Badung and Lombok Straits. Four days later we were in Borneo.

Nancy and Neil
s/v Active Light
Berth B-18, Yacht Haven Marina
Phuket, Thailand
November 27th, 2004