Indonesia Indonesian Life Scholarship Program Komodo Sumbawa Lombok Growing Rice Bali Royal Funeral Java Borneo
We departed from Scarborough, Australia just north of Brisbane in early May of 2006. Our sail northwards along Australia's east coast was long and tedious with very few good cruising stops. Most days we were up at 6 am and underway until 4 pm just making miles. The towns are spaced about 5-7 days apart and with difficult anchorages in between we often would not even get off the boat to go ashore in between the towns. From Scarborough to Cape York on the top of the Australian continent is well over 1,000 miles and nearly every day we had cold weather, gray skies and winds of 30 knots or more. Many days we needed to only put out half our genoa and we could fly along at 7.5 knots. The strong winds made it easy to make lots of miles each day but nevertheless it was a long trip. We had anticipated breaking up our passage with scuba dives on the Great Barrier reef along which we were traversing, but unfortunately the strong winds made that impossible. For Rob who had dreamed of diving the Great Barrier reef since he started scuba diving in 1972 it was a big disappointment.
After 6 weeks of near constant travel we finally rounded Cape York and officially moved from the Pacific Ocean into the Indian Ocean. Ventana had now tasted the waters of all 3 major oceans, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian. From Cape York we made two back to back 3 day passages covering over 600 miles, then a few day hops later we arrived in Darwin Australia. From here we would depart for Indonesia.
To read about our travels in Indonesia click any of the following links:
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To read about the rest of our Asia travels click any of the following links:
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