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 The pictures in this post are mostly old, but previously unpublished.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.