We’ve now been going non-stop for 35 hours, since leaving the Wessel Islands yesterday morning and setting off north to Indonesia across the Arafura Sea. Since posting yesterday afternoon, we’ve covered another 140 or so nms, for a total of 228nms since yesterday morning at an average of 6.5 knots.

Overnight our speed was down as the breeze eased and allowed us to get a good sleep in a quiet boat. This morning again the wind piped up to 25 knots, and we had two reefs in the mainsail and with the staysail and 3 turns on the genoa and still spent most the morning surfing the steep seas at up to 15 knots. The quiet night was shared with a tern who landed on our solar panels in the dark and hitched a ride until early this morning. The sky was lit with a bright moon, and the water glowed with intense phosphorescence that made the hulls shine white and leave a ghostly glow in our wake. After the moon set at around 0200, we saw the lights of many Indonesian fishing boats even though we were still in the Australian economic zone.

Good boatspeed all morning had us hoping for an overnight anchorage tonight at Pulau Enu in the Aru Islands. But the breeze has fullen away again, and we have all sail up and struggling to make 6 knots of speed.

We have just had an encounter with 5 Indonesian fishing vessels. The photo below shows our boat at the bottom, leaving a track across the screen, and the 5 triangles at the top represent each of the fishing vessels that transmit their position over the AIS (Automatic Identification System) that all commercial vessels are required to carry and use. These fishing boats were strung out across our desired path towards the island of Enu, and not being sure of their operation, steered well clear, suspecting that they could have been operating co-operatively with nets or lines strung between them, we steered well away.

It was at this point that we decided to skip Enu, and head straight to the Kai Islands. If we had have continued to Enu, our arrival would have been some time after midnight. With the seas and winds easing, we figured that we’ll get a better night’s sleep at sea than waiting up to get anchored at Enu, and so when we altered course for those fishing boats, we have just continued on along that path.

At this stage, we are hoping to get the anchor down late tomorrow at the bottom end of the Kai Islands.