We sat under the steaming Krakatau for a week waiting for the trade winds which should have started. This was a good rest time for us before the big push; swimming five times a day in crystal water, combing the black sand beach and climbing half way up Anak Krakatau, fantastic. When the wardens arrived they declared the top half of the volcano out of bounds as it was spewing sulphurous steam and smoke. We rate this as one of our best anchorages and exciting as we thought that we would just be seeing Krakatoa as we passed by through the Sunda Strait.

Finally the wind went around to the North East so we moved anchorage to another island in the group, the rather flat Pulau Rakata Kecil, which is close by and gave good shelter. We use GRIB files for our main source of weather when out of Wi-Fi contact. These are simple compressed files that show winds for the area you specify as a very basic map with wind arrows. They are generated automatically from weather data and are therefore a bit unreliable, often under-estimating wind strengths. They were continuing to show light and variable winds whilst the wind we were actually experiencing reached a pleasant Force 4.

For the Indian Ocean we had also decided to use a routing service, a paid for weather expert who tailors a forecast for your exact route and takes into account your likely boat speed. He predicted little wind until Wednesday which meant another 4½ days waiting. We hummed and haa’d both feeling that the good wind we were having wasn’t just local, it felt like trade wind. In the end we decided to ignore these 2 sources of weather info and go… we’re glad we did.

For the first 36 hours we had almost perfect sailing conditions with the NE4 continuing. This is a following wind for our course so we have had the genoa boomed out one side and the cruising chute out the other during the day. It’s a rather unwieldy rig so we reduce sail at night in case anything nasty comes up. So far it has not.

The wind has gone a bit lighter now and also has switched to the more usual SE. Our route for the next months will be all in the SE Trades so we should have good winds from the right direction for fast passages. The Indian Ocean has a reputation for big uncomfortable swells but so far they have been benign. There are 2 metre swells coming from the south but well-spaced so not causing us any problem. We have had a few squalls, a couple during the day but it always feels as though these things come at night as the lightening is more obvious. Last night was a long one which brought headwinds sometimes at 30 knots forcing us to alter course and go in the wrong direction for two hours. Fortunately the radar shows up these storms and we were able to motor around the edge for the last 3 hours of it as it was reasonably well behaved and moving in one direction rather than circling which is more difficult to manage.

So far so good, if we arrive on Friday morning as predicted then we will have done Indonesian Krakatoa, to Aussie Cocos Keeling in 5 days. We’ll be happy with that.