At P.Sipica
S/V Galatea update
Neil Scott
Tue 7 Apr 2015 10:37
Hi all, We had a nice couple of days at P.Asu. It is interesting, most everyone there was Christian - that was nice, none of that noisy muslim prayer calling stuff. There were actually some casual resorts there and we ate at 2 of them, mammy Silvi's and Puri villa, the later part owned by the son of the guy Tommy Chong from Cheech and Chong fame. I never liked those guys, (they were sort of famous in California in the 80's), but it was quite funny to bump into somebody like that a million miles from anywhere. It was fun though and a nice break from pies and chicken. We had a nice green curry style squid dinner - very tasty. And mammy Silvi made us a big banana cake to take on the boat - it's delicious. The people here in west sumatra have all been very friendly and helpful. We had dinner the other night with some Chinese Indonesian guys from Medan. They were fun and very interested about the sailing trip. We crossed the equator at 7am this morning, 3rd time for Galatea, each of us having a small swig from our only liquor supply (other than beer), the dregs of an old bottle of Triple Sec that not even the Indonesian customs guys wanted as a souvenir!! We poured a 4th swig into the ocean to keep old Neptune happy. I might just have enough left in that bottle to cover the northbound Atlantic equator crossing down the road. We then arrived at P.Sipika at 1 pm today after the 90 mile overnight trip from Asu, which included the sighting of a couple of dolphin pods (there seem to be quite a few of them around these parts). As usual for this trip, after leaving Sabang, we motored the whole way other than for a teaser of a wind just after we weighed anchor in Asu. Anyway, it seems like a quiet bay here with a surfer resort/camp nearby, that is, quiet after they ditched their nasty technobeat music a couple of hours after our arrival. We will probably have to go eat there tomorrow as "payment" for anchoring in their bay. It will be interesting to see if anyone is surfing the break. It looks like a pretty good one, although we have been told that the surf season only begins in April and runs through August, the timing of the southern Indian ocean winter storm season that sends big swells up this way. Luckily, we will be out of here before the surf hots up, but the flip is that we will be in the south indian ocean to face those swells coming up from the southern ocean, but then, at least we will miss the south Indian summer cyclone season - all a bit confusing. We have decided that motoring is bad for the freezer's performance. The fridge/freezer is probably not sufficiently insulated from the heat of the engine which is located right next to it. Certainly, when we were anchored for a couple of days at Asu, the freezer was pretty much below freezing the whole time. Guess we just need to get sailing again. Teague has just done a minor service of the windlass and is now getting back to his GRE study book. Mike is resting. Ok, that's it for now. We plan to get across to Padang, Teague's departure point, by the 12th. This will give us a day in hand should anything go awry. Until the next update, cheers from Neil, teague and mike. - S/V Galatea (Due to limited satellite bandwidth, please delete any previous text in the string or compose a new message when replying) |