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September 2, 2005

Resting up before the Big One

DAY: 80
LOCATION: Pulau Trawangan
NAUTICAL MILES TODAY: 13
NAUTICAL MILES YESTERDAY: 16
NAUTICAL MILES TOTAL TRIP: 741.5
LATITUDE : S 08 degs, 21.23'
LONGITUDE: E 116 degs, 02.57'

Tonight we are beat. The last three days paddling against a 1-knot current across the northern shore of Lombok has taken it out of us. That plus the heat, the insects (which have been eating April alive in particular) and the struggle to get 'Queenie' up above the high water mark for each evening's camp has take a toll. Then yesterday evening I managed to take a 4-inch slice out of of my right hand climbing a palm tree to get a coconut, now rendering it only partially useful for paddling. (Actually, to be accurate, it wasn't a coconut I was trying to retrieve, it was the spear from my speargun that got snagged in the top of the palm tree I was trying to shoot a coconut out of. An embarrassing episode followed when the owner of the tree finally rolled up and I had to pay him 15,000 Rupiah to climb the tree and retrieve the spear!).

So we'll rest here on the island of Trawangan before the big 20-mile crossing of Selat Lombok Sunday. After sourcing local information from local fishing boat skippers we've come to the conclusion that we'll need every ounce of strength we have to beat the southerly current through the Selat and make good a due west heading to the NE edge of Bali. If we leave at low tide at 6am we'll have 6 hours of moderate southerly drift before the tide changes at noon and things really start to head south in a hurry. By this time we'll hopefully be nearing our destination. The main worry is the way the SE coast of Bali slopes off at a 45 degree angle to the SW. What this means is that for every mile we are swept south by the current, we have to paddle an extra mile over an above the minmum 20 to get to land. So with a 3-knot southerly current, against which we can counter perhaps only 1.5 knots with a compensatory heading to the starboard (right/north), we'd be taken around 11 miles south for a 7-hour crossing which would in turn mean a further 11-miles to paddle. What we don't want get into is a situation where we're sucked south down the Selat, and we only have an hour of daylight to paddle a further 10-miles or more to shore. And the further south we're taken towards Selat Badung, the more the likelihood of encountering whirlpools.

Sorry to get all technical on you here, but I'm just sharing what is taking centre stage in my head right now.

Posted on September 2, 2005 1:40 PM

Comments

Posted by: Jake at September 3, 2005 12:00 AM