Batam - Nongsa Point 18 November

Moonshadow of London
Peter Mantle
Wed 24 Nov 2010 05:01
Position 01:11N 104:05E
 
We were up at 0430 and left Kumai for Batam Island at sunrise on the 14th of November. This was a 600 nm passage and only about 6 hours of it were done without the motor running! We were amazed that the current that was on the bow going northwest to Borneo was now on the nose again as we headed west! The wind seemed to be on the nose again also. So our speed was 5 knots for most of the four and one-half day passage. On the night watches, we saw fishing vessels lit up like islands from miles away. One night Peter and David counted 40 of these vessels that were all round the horizon. We had to weave our way through them as we motored on through the night.
Our watermaker has been working fine since David repaired it in Bali - and our routine is to make water and bread about every other day at sea with the genset running.
We arrived ahead of schedule on Thursday, the 18th of November, turning into Nongsa Point Marina at about 1600. We hurried to get tied up, Met Tony, the Blue Water Rally official and promptly made our way to the swimming pool and consumed not a few beers before dinner. The marina is a top-notch facility with all the amenities we could want.
The next morning we had a briefing by Tony that provided information on crossing the Singapore Strait and making our way into the Keppel Bay Marina, a world-class marina that has won the Asian Marina of the Year award this year.
We started late on the four-hour sail across because an enormous thunderstorm parked over the marina two hours. We just stayed at the breakfast table and ordered lunch while swapping storied with Glenda and Ian from the yacht "Lucie Alice".
The Singapore Strait may be the busiest shipping area on the planet and our radar was so peppered with targets - all large ships - that would couldn't MARPA them or even figure out which vessels we were seeing. The visibility had improved enough that we could visually make our way safely across, but there were some adrenalin moments when we crossed the westbound shipping lane in front of the 1,000 foot long container ship "Northern Jupiter" which was moving at her top speed of 15 knots or so.

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