On the second day of our crossing of the Arafura Sea on way to Indonesia, we were looking forward to anchoring up for the night at Pulau Enu, at the southern end of the Aru Islands in eastern Indonesia. The Aru Islands are geologically part of the Australian plate, and are surrounded by shallow waters.

We had had a brisk wind all morning and had hand steered the boat as the autopilot was not so good at handling the 25 knot winds which was surfing us on the steep waves, at times up to 15 knots, and were making good time. It looked like we might get anchored at Enu before dark.

But late in the day, the breeze dropped to around 10 knots, and our speed was down around 5 knots as we fought against the current. In the end, the slow speed meant we had to give up on the idea of making Enu in time for a sleep, and instead set course for the southern end of the Kai Islands, the capital of which, Tual, is our next port. We can not leave SeeBeeZee until we have cleared in to Indonesia with customs and immigration at Tual.

While disappointed to miss out on a restful night, we ate and prepared for what we expected to be a calm night at sea with the light winds. Nothing could have prepared us for what was ahead.

During the afternoon, we had approached and veered away from a group of 5 fishing vessels. As the sun set, another group of fishing boats began to appear on our chartplotter as AIS targets (see previous post about AIS). They did not appear on our system until we were within a few miles of them, as they don’t have masts to mount the line of sight AIS antenna far above the water.

As darkness fell, we could not see these fishing boats, but further to the north and west, the sky was filling with a glow from beyond the horizon. Eventually, the entire horizon, from the south-west through the north to the north-east was lit up. We continued along our course to the north west, right into the middle of these glows, and the glows gradually became bright lights, and the glows were replaced by more.

This would have been an excellent time to turn on our radar and mark out each of these lights as a big red blob on the electronic chartplotter, but we have a problem with our radar. Despite working while we came north up the Queensland coast when we didn’t really need it, now the network hub that connects the radar to the chartplotter has failed.

There was no indication of the purpose of this collection. The sea had become shallow, being only 30 metres here, where it had been over 100m late this afternoon. We knew from the charts that the water further west was many hundreds of metres. The bright lights suggested squid fishing, but we could not be sure what was happening.

With no choice but to continue, we pushed on into this fleet of anchored fishing boats, each running generators to illuminate strings of bright lights around their decks. We had to conclude from the number of boats that this was not a co-ordinated fishing effort, but simply a large number of individuals living off the ocean, and as such, must be coming and going regularly, and this gave us the confidence to push into to the fleet.

There were literally thousands of them. At any time, you could count a hundred lit up boats, with the glow of more extending over the horizon as these low vessels lights became a glow when more than a couple of miles away. This number persisted all night, as we continued through until daylight rose over the western end of the fleet, some 40nms from where we entered. I would estimate that there must have been in excess of a thousand such boats in a space of about 100 square nautical miles.

We took turns to sleep and to keep watch, as at times we passed within a 100 metres of the anchored boats, they were so closely anchored. Twice boats under way approached us and came too close, and we could not determine whether they had not seen us or were just curious about a sail boat.

Once daylight came, we were only clear of the anchored boats for a couple of hours, before coming across a smaller sparser collection, but were able to get some photos of these in the daylight. This gave us am opportunity to actually see what we had been encountering, as the dazzle of the bright lights hid the boats that they were strung from.

While we had been warned about the hazard that the Indonesian fishing fleet presents to yachts crossing the Arafura, no description could have prepared us for what we experienced last night. It was something that we can never forget.