The value of a few official-looking documents and the joys of hotel-life

We are in Ambon, Indonesia. In fact we're about to leave Ambon. We are actually here rather legally. When we got here we marched over to the authorities with the documents we were able to get our sticky fingers on in Jayapura and cleared in using those. It ran almost without a hitch!

Now we've taken on diesel to replace what we burned going north of Irian Jaya. We've also taken on what can be noted as a pessblaut low in regards of water quality. It tastes like sea- and freswater half-and-half, but it hasn't made us sick when we tried it, so what the heck. Now we're leaving for Bali. We're - at least I am - quite sick of - experiencing other cultures and doing all that grown up stuff. I'm ready for some westernized low-culture. Beaches, beers and bikinis! I shall personally hug the first pale, beer gutted, speedo-clad german I see.

In the "so what else is new slot" of this blogspot the pessblaut-boys report that Jukka had enough of sailing in low winds, contrary winds and unfavourable currents and jumped ship here in Ambon. He has taken it upon him to be our advanced party, take point, and establish a fire-base for us in Bali. We'll hook up there after J has made a visa-run to some obscure asian country so that he can stay longer in Indo. Before he left us though, we grasped the opportunity to invade his hotel-room by the airport and did our best to acomplish an old-fashioned hotel-room drinking binge. It went a little something like this:

-Take taxi to hotel by airport, try and sneak past reception in order not to have to book more than one room
-Book one more room as sneaking-skills are rusty
-Drink, play music and argue
-Repeat above for ten hours
-Enjoy the local hotel fauna: Mice, cockroaches and lizards
-See Joachim off to airport at six in the morning
-Have hotel breakfast (one loaf of white bread, choice of two different jams, tea or coffee)
-Go to extra room which so far has not been touched
-Sleep for a few hours until check-out time
-Check out, make way back to town by local transportation

Soon Ambon and a reason for a pictureless blog

We're now nearing Ambon with the engine running, sails up, an opposing current running under the keel and our fingers, toes, legs -and whatever we're able to cross- crossed that the ambonese authorities will let us stay in the country.

The trip here have have been frustrating. We were able to get away with a load of diesel from Sorong without anyone paying too much attention to our lack of valid indonesian travel-documents. Apart from that we have been battling opposing wind and currents pretty much since we left the windless area just below the equator north of the island of Irian Jaya. Poor Joachim who joined us in Jayapura didn't exactly get the trip he was hoping for: a couple of anchorages, apart from that A LOT of sailing, however in frustrating wind- and current conditions for most of the time. Everything seems to have been taking quite a lot more time than expected.

As the most observant of you guys might have noticed there has not been a lot of pictures on the blog lately. We're experiencing some problems after the harddrive on Egil's computer broke down. We were miraculously able to change the harddrive for the one still in Øyvinds laptop whose screen broke down in Fiji. However we lost a lot of software and drivers and other things with funny names that you apparantly find inside a harddrive. We are going to fix this, but we need a little time and a half-decent internet connection. Until then, please be patient, support us and keep following the blog. We'll get a lot more pictures in there eventually!

Illegal alien cruising in Indo

Tuesday 18th., morning outside the northern point of Irian Jaya, Indonesia.

We're just below equator now. As anyone who knows anything about world-wide weather can tell you this area is notorious for being still and windless. We have -in our infinite wisdom- decided to take our sailboat up here. Furthermore we have not brought extra diesel. Last night the engine coughed and died and we had to fill the last of our fuel on the tank, so now we're down to the last 35 hours worth of engine time. We are hoping to find a town soon so we can get some more fuel. However our papers are patchy at best. We are offically thrown out of the country. We are however allowed to travel in Indonesian waters, but we are not allowed to anchor anywhere, so we haven't done that. We have certainly not anchored two or three places before we reached this point. We have most definitely not stayed for a couple of days at a beautiful beach on Yapen Island. Picking our own coconuts and lime and mixing it with gin for our sundown card-game on the beach.

Joachim joined us in Jayapura, and we haven't grown sick of him and used him for shark-bait yet. In fact it's really sweet to be able to split the night-watches in three instead of two. Also we get some new stories thrown in to our gossip-pool and we get to recycle the stories that the two of us has swapped so many times we're not sure who of us told it in the first place. Jokke has also definitely NOT used his military jungle skills to take us on a little jungle expedition since we haven't anchored anywhere.

Our plan now is to make it to the town of Ambon and try to clear in there. Rumour has it that they're supposed to be more cooperative there. We're crossing fingers.
Peace out.

TROUBLE!!

SHITdamnfuckingshitfuckdamn!!

We just cleared in to Indonesia, the only place we actually have worked getting our papers sorted before we went. Simply because we have heard it can be a bit of a sweat with all the paperwork and because it's a crucial country to be in the clear.

Yup, cleared in and Linked up with Joachim from back home who is supposed to join us for a few weeks. Everything seems supersmooth and we are enjoying a decent dinner and shooting the breeze and catching up when the customsguys comes over to tell us there's problems...

Apparantly we're missing a crucial paper and we have to leave Indo within 24 hours. If that sounds somewhat allright i suggest you check your map. This sucks not only because we've paid some bloody agent shitloads of denares to fixall the paperwork, but also because it might mean we might spend the next three weeks at sea, we'll have to throw all our planning to maasen and that we might not make our deadline across the indian ocean.

Right now we're looking into the option of heading directly to Malaysia, but most of all we're hoping to fix this situation and keep on going as planned. We're scheduled for another meeting with customs tomorrow, but we've also been told that we'll have to leave the country by 2 pm.

Yups, that's it, the show must go on somehow, but we have no idea how, and we don't know whether we'll be able to update you much. hang in there!

Madang to Vanimo, passage in PNG

Okay, let's start with the end.

It's the morning of the last day of July and my diver's watch tells me that the sun should have risen about one hour ago. It's a grey, rainy and miserable day, just as the whole night has been. We're approaching Vanimo, the last stop of Papua New Guinea before we are supposed to dart over to Indonesia and Jayapura. Egil is asleep below, he's pulled the midnight-to-four watch, whereas I've done the evening-midnight and am now doing the four-to-morning watch.

I'm wearing shorts - as I have been for the last eight months - and an oilskin jacket. I'm standing in the bow clutching a coffe-mug in one hand and the bent-and-mangled boathook in the other, while the windwane is steering the boat. There are quite a few major rivers running into the sea around here and they seem to be dispersing driftwood of impressive size that lie in belts that can stretch for miles into the sea. We hit a log yesterday, but luckily without any other damage than a few branches stuck in our fishing line. Now we're running through another one of these belts of up-to-no-good driftwood. So, I'm standing in the bow, having a coffee, keeping a lookout and being ready to fend off any evil-doing semi-submerged logs, it's seven-thirty in the morning and I think to myself, quite philosophically: "We're approaching a town which potentially has an internet-connection, what can we write in the blog? What's happened since Madang?" The answer comes to me as a revelation after another sip of coffee as another four-metre piece of driftwood misses us by two metres: "Not an awful lot."
Yep, that's it folks, so little we didn't even take any pictures. The pictures in this post are mostly old, but previously unpublished. We had a lot of fickle winds, and since we're expecting quite a lot of that for the next month or two, we've decided to start motoring when there's no wind. (As opposed to the "drifting and waiting" policy we've exercised so far). So a lot of motoring this leg, and of course we had some problems again, but they seem to be fixed (again). We expect it's a leakage in one of the dieselfilters. However we are also keeping the options open for it being a problem with the cooling, the exhaust, the pistons, the air-intake or any other part of the engine since we have no clue what we're doing.

The only thing to break up the monotony on this leg was a short stop for half a day and one night on Laing Island, a tiny thing that used to have a Belgian research station on it, now there's nothing. We met some locals there, had them over for coffee and joined them at their campfire in the evening. We were also approached by some other locals who wanted to sell us marijuana by the kilo. Early next morning we headed out again and pretty soon we had ourself a nice mackerel, way to big for only the two of us, so after Øyvind had made his debut cutting fish-fillet we headed over to an outrigger canoe we were passing. The guy was obviously fishing, so we figured we'd cut his workday short by handing him a couple of kilo's of mackerel-fillet. However as we approached the guy started paddling away from us, but we were faster and in the end we caught up. The guy looked rather terrified, but after we handed him the bag of fish he was only looking suspicious. We had a rather broken conversation out there on the sea with him asking us questions in mixed pidgin and english and we answering "From Madang" "Norway" and "to Vanimo" randomly. After the "to Vanimo" part he looked satisfied and we headed off again. The last we saw of the guy was him inspecting the plastic bag with his "catch" of mangled mackerel fillet.