08:18.668S   118:23.118E

Tuesday 21^st September 2010

Kilo, Sumbawa Island

The anchorage here is just behind a protective reef, offering us a lovely calm night with virtually no swell coming in from the prevailing NE wind.  Ollie and I had a drift snorkel over the reef, which had a very fast current running as it is full moon at the moment.  The coral was very good, but hardly any fish, due to its proximity to the town.

We had to put up with a lot of bad signing going on over a tannoy in the town.  Ollie found out later from a boat load of young men that there had been a circumcision festival going on in the town, hence it seemed a bit like a fair going on.  We did not venture ashore to discover.  Meanwhile, David had a very frustrating time trying to get our watermaker to stop getting air into it.  Then he discovered it was the priming pump that kept shutting off as soon as the watermaker was too warm!  Oh dear, and we only had 1/3^rd of a tank of fresh water!  Rationing time! 

Next morning, having slept on the problem, David tried putting in a matchstick against the priming pump switch to get it to stay on, and it worked!  Sometimes it’s the simplest of solutions....

We motored past this huge volcano of Tambora, which is 9,600 feet high, with its associated mini vent volcanoes, seen here as the dark spots in the picture on the left hand side.  They looked as if they had newly erupted, with black sooty lava on their sides.

The fertile clad hillsides seemed to have a couple of military camps on their sides, little blue houses all lined up in rows, too small to see here.