May 5, 2024
We’re heading south along the east coast of Sulawesi from almost the very top of the island to the very bottom. It’s about 450 miles as the crow flies (almost) and we are trying to do it without overnight passages. We’re making 30 to 40 mile hops every day and spending every night in a different bay.
Every day, it’s the same thing: get the anchor up around 8 AM, head out onto a mostly flat, windless sea, watch the squalls develop around mid-day, get hit by a squall or two in the afternoon, make our way into a bay to anchor at about 3 or 4 PM. It’s been an amazingly consistent routine, and not an unpleasant one, despite the squalls.
The squalls haven’t been too bad with the worst of them blowing to about 20 knots (though often on the nose). We often just miss all or most of the rain. Other than the squall wind, there hasn’t been enough wind to warrant sails, with the exception of motor-sailing with the headsail up today for about 2 hours.
Most of the places we’ve anchored in so far have been bays we spent time in on our last trip down this coast. Some have been new like this bay last night.
The last time by, we didn’t think we could get into the bay through that shallow entrance. I guess we had more confidence this time and it was no problem, with 16 feet the shallowest we saw on the way in.
There isn’t much info we’ve found about anchorages along this coast. Every time we’ve found a suitable anchorage, we’ve shared it on Zulu Waterways – a crowd-sourced anchorage guide.
Needless to say, there are no cruising boats around. Other than small, local fishing boats, there aren’t really any other boats at all. It feels like we have Indonesia’s coast to ourselves.
Tomorrow, we think we’ll have to break the routine and spend an extra day where we are now. This will give us better weather for a big 70-mile jump on Tuesday. It sounds so nice to me right now to have a day off. What will we do?!
-Rich
