The strangely shaped island of Sulawesi is surrounded by four seas and the Makassar Strait. Since leaving the Sulu Sea to cross the border from Malaysia’s Sabah to Indonesia’s Kalimantan, Sulawesi and the Togean islands, we have journeyed through the Celebes Sea, the Molucca Sea, the Banda Sea and the Buton Strait which took us into the Flores Sea to Makassar in South Sulawesi. Still in the Flores Sea, we have left busy Makassar and beautiful Sulawesi far behind now and have a wonderful wind carrying us west north west toward the Java Sea and our rendezvous at Batam with anak laki laki Peter and anak perampua Hattie on 9^th December.

We are crossing the bottom of the Makassar Strait which runs between Sulawesi and Kalimantan.

Two days of excellent wind gave out to be followed by four days motoring....some of it into a very stiff headwind up to 30 knots interspersed with slow sailing when we followed the wind and not the course. The photograph below is of our navigation screen showing the course we set below Borneo; you can see some of the rivers which pour out here. Gryphon 11 can be seen in red and our actual route showing how we had to deviate from the course to catch the wind – very frustrating.

The change was accompanied by much rain, lightning and thunder (still happening to some extent), which is probably the north east monsoon exerting its dominance over the south west one as we are in the transition period. We also entered the Java Sea which is far more busy with fishing boats, especially at night.

Thunder clouds advancing.

We did, however, manage to catch a fish which doesn’t often happen in Indonesia. Not very big but fed us for a couple of days.

For the last 48 hours before Pulau Belitung Gryphon 11 was going more slowly than expected and we could not understand why.  We concluded that it must be a combination of not just the head winds but also current against us as we are below Borneo where many rivers empty into the sea. However, when we anchored just now Chris saw part of a bamboo pole just poking out from the side of the boat; we thought the anchor chain must have caught it. With difficulty he got a rope on it and pulled it free, it was caught across our keel. Thick and about 5-6 metres long it was covered in barnacles and looked as though it had been submerged for years, we now realise that we must have caught it on the keel two nights ago and have been towing ever since – bad words spoken! There is so much afloat here, stuff is carried down the rivers or fish aggregation devices break up, we were lucky it wasn't an FGL (f…ing great log) which can do real damage.

We have moved to anchor up the river in Manggar at Belitung Island and are surrounded by friendly fishing boats. “Hello Mister”, echoes all around us. We have met Frans from the local government tourist office who is a great contact, he is helping us to acquire diesel and will act as our guide when we go exploring tomorrow.

Unhappily we have now found out what happened in the Philippines whilst we were at sea. We heard that a cyclone was on its way to the Philippines just as we were leaving Makassar, then last night we heard via short wave radio on BBC world service that it had been the worst cyclone ever and had caused huge devastation. So very terrible for such a poor country or any country; we read on the internet just now that over 3,500 people have been killed so far as is currently known with more fatalities expected. We haven’t seen any TV footage but emails from our daughter Hattie and friends tell us that there is little left of some islands.

We had planned to go up to the Philippines from Sabah and would have had Peter, Hattie and Ben there for Christmas but we found it was difficult for them to get to the island of Palawan, where we could take the boat within the time frame, as well as being very expensive. Also we had anxieties about the risk of cyclones so we changed our minds and came down into Indonesia instead – a fortunate decision else we should have been there when this happened although the island of Palawan was not hit. Indonesia has never had a cyclone.

We are here for a few days recuperation then will carry on to Batam.