Sailing Indonesia - Bawean to Singapore

The tropical sun and heat were intense as we sailed north away from Bali and towards the equator.
Both of us used our sarongs, ikats, and hats to the fullest.

Indonesia offered a terrific variety of the most fantastic boats everywhere we went.
This one was sailing into the small island of Bawean as we arrived there.
It has, very typically, beautiful lines and flamboyant paintwork, and it carries
the ubiquitous Indonesian lateen sailing rig with polypropylene sails.

Bawean offered a terrific harbor near its northwest corner with an excellent anchorage.

There were a bunch of these fishing boats from Java there. Fantastic lines! And fantastic paint jobs.

These fishermen know how to make a boat look good!

Not only were these boats wonderful to look at. They were also full of good fish!

And since they had lots of fish, Chrissi paddled over to get some.
We were certainly ready to pay or trade, but they gave us
some lovely fish for free.

Bawean also had some pretty good markets in a fair sized town a few kilometers from the anchorage. Just hire some guys with motorbikes to take you there and back. There was also a lovely lake high in the interior of the island, a very nice break from our life on the sea. Ahhh. . .

We can also catch fish without having to visit fishermen for them! A perfect catch, Chrissi! And great eating!

The season was advancing and we could expect long periods of calms and squalls to set in
if we dallied for too long.

So we took a long jump northward with a planned stop in the small island of Surutu.
This took us right past Borneo and the Indonesian state of Kalimantan.
That's where we hit the SMOKE. At about 2 degrees 30 minutes South latitude.

The smoke is from the intentional burning of the tropical rainforest - to facilitate the growing of Palm Oil.
The SMOKE extended many hundreds of miles, and did not end until
we were finally up to the far northern part of Malaysia.
Dreadful stuff. And it stinks - bad.

The smoked "cleared" for about an hour here in the northwestern anchorage at Pejantan,
another island north of Surutu, but still pretty close to Kalimantan.
Visibility was frequently about 100 to 200 meters.
Having no radar, that made it pretty hairy when sailing across busy traffic lanes in these waters.

In the anchorages, we found that insects that normally "sing" at night were confused and sang in the day.

We had a lot of lost birds catching a ride with us. The smoke and its smell had them totally lost and confused.

This egret stayed with us a couple of days, never ate, and was finally so weak, that it couldn't fly and fell overboard as we finally approached land.

Human society in these parts is devastated by the Palm Oil industry too: with isolated ruined poor villages that rarely emerge from the pall of stinking smoke.

Singapore was complaining about the smoke to the Indonesia authorities when we got there.
But it didn't seem to do any good.

We finally arrived in the very north of Indonesia and cleared out from the marina in Batam
for Singapore. It had been a fantastic trip in Indo, and we were off for new and very different adventures.

Singy was a hell of a change and an impressive place, but it didn't encourage many photographs,
especially in the smoke and rain. It looked a bit like this:

Use these Links to Continue:

Indonesia - page 1

Indonesia page 2: Lembata to Makassar

Indonesia, page 3 - Makassar

Indonesia, page 4 - Makassar to Lombok, the accident

Indonesia, page 5 - Lombok and Bali

Chrissi describes our Indonesia / Malaysia Adventures

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Sailing Indonesia!!

page 6: Bawean and north to Singapore - with SMOKE