afternoon, where we peered through the classroom windows
at desks and maps and paintings on the wall. San, his dad and
the local schoolteacher, joined us. He explained that we were
the first yacht to ever visit their village. Some of the people had
never seen one before, but were not phased by the idea that we
lived on Esper. To them, a life on the water seemed natural.
A few of the houses have televisions, but Bajar and his
friends don’t have phones. There is no access to the internet
in the village, so the children spend their time making up
games and playing around the area.
They know the names of all the trees and plants, and made
it their mission to teach me too. Kelapa (coconut) and pisang
(banana) I could already identify, and I was pretty sure I could
pick out a mangga (mango) tree, but this was the first time I
discovered what a cengkeh (clove) tree looks like. Their
guileless enthusiasm for the natural world around them was
almost heartbreaking.
Sadly, we were coming to the end of our 30 days, and it was
time to leave. The dinghy was well and truly beached, with
about 50m of black mud between us and any kind of water,
so Bajar and the gang rolled up their trousers and with Jamie
leading, helped us to push it across the ooze. Their laughter
and screams as they sunk up to their bony thighs and fell face
forwards into the gooey mess echoed around the bay. We
waved all the way back to the boat, and carried on waving
from the deck as darkness fell. We will be back.
FOLLOW THE ADVENTURE
Liz and Jamie have been living
aboard Esper since 2006. Built
in 1988, she is an Oyster 435 cutter-
rigged ketch. They picked up Millie
in Turkey, then sailed through the
Red Sea, stopping in Egypt, Sudan,
Eritrea, Yemen and Oman before
heading to India, the Maldives,
Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.
Each week, they upload episodes
to their popular sailing channel,
Followtheboat. They have one
of the oldest sailing blogs
on the net. Visit their website
http://www.followtheboat.com or search
Followtheboat on YouTube to
watch films from their video diary.Equator110°EINDONESIASUMA BORNEO
TRAMALAYSIATIOMANPULAUKEPULAUAN
ANAMBASSingaporeSouth China SeaIndian
OceanMalacca StraitPangkorNPULAU
JEMAJAKEPULAUAN
ANAMBAS
INDONESIASouth China
SeaPENJALINGENTING
UJUTSAGU
DAMPARPULAU
SEMUTLetungTerempaAir Putih05 10nmPULAU
SIANTANPULAU
MUBURPULAU MATAKPULAU
AIRABUNAVIGATING IN THE DARK
Charts aren’t much use once you get
in among the bommies, shelves and
drop-offs. The only hope you have
of finding a safe place is to have
someone up high spotting through
polarised sunglasses while the other
person steers. Jamie and I usually take
it in turns. We have anchored along the
coral-fringed western side of the Red
Sea from Egypt, through Sudan and
Eritrea as well as among the hundreds
of miles of bommie-strewn tiny dots
in the Maldives. During our trip south
through the Red Sea in 2010, Jamie
cached Google Earth images of all
the likely places we planned to anchor.
By using the images and eye-balling
the pathways, we were able to get
deep inside the narrow marsas
which drive into the desert there.
Esper’s B&G system uses Navionics,
and we have the app versions on ourphones, but in the Anambas, we used
Navionics only for the broader picture
and when we were clear of the islands.
This is because it is out longitudinally
by a few hundred meters, meaning
east to west is dangerously wrong. We
informed them of this, and hope that
changes have been made.
Once closer to shore, we used GPS
with Ovital maps, as well as the Offline
Maps app with ESRI map data. The
latter is excellent because it allowed us
to whack up the contrast to see the
reefs clearly, and makes it easier than
Ovital to read in blistering sunlight. We
have an iPad which we don’t use often
but after leaving the Anambas and
finding some decent kind of internet, I
downloaded iSailor which seemed very
good. Cruising Guide to Indonesia by
Andy Scott (Imray, £5 7 .50) has a
chapter on the Anambas Islands.
http://www.cruisingguideindonesia.com.ADVENTURE