Calypso's Journal: Trying to find some wind

Looking across the bay to the mountains of Sulawesi

Once Paul was feeling more like himself, we decided to brave the entrance to Maratua, one of the islands we'd visited on our day tour. He needed to do some scraping on the bottom now that his energy levels were back in tact. However, this little venture was not something we'd want to do too often as both the trip into the anchorage and back out again was through a narrow, reef-lined channel with horrendous currents and despite the fact that we chose slack tide, the currents ran against us both ways at such a rate that, at full revs for over an hour, we couldn't even achieve one knot. We were thankful that Saol Eile hadn't joined us (they were still too sick) as it wouldn't have thrilled them at all. Instead we met them crossing the Macassar Straits on our way to Sulawesi, the distorted amoeba-shaped Island to Borneo's east.

We had decided to go across to the Sulawesi side in the hopes of getting a better angle to the wind in order to start the longer journey back westwards. The two and a half day trip across gave us one day of good sailing tacking back and forth but the rest was motoring. We crossed the equator again and arrived in the town of Donggala dropping anchor in a fairly stony bottom but were confident it would hold in all but a very strong squall.

Now, taking a yacht into Indonesia isn't the easiest thing to do as there are so many hoops to jump through. The only reason we came back was that most of those hoops had been taken care of by joining a rally which was free and, to top it all off, offered a free CAIT, the certificate required to take a vessel through Indonesian waters and which cost us an arm and a leg last year. We'd been told that things were getting easier but I think they forgot to tell every leg of the military as, that night at midnight, we were woken and boarded by the Indonesian Navy demanding our papers and threatening us with arrest as our CAIT did not reflect Donggala as one of our stops. For quite a while they were somewhat aggressive but it finally all ended OK and they left us in peace once they'd made a phone call which probably told them to step down. Bit scary though.

The rest of our time was spent visiting the market to buy fresh produce and topping up with diesel. Diesel is another problem in Indonesia as, ever since the Bali bombings in 2002, it has been against the law to sell or carry diesel in jerry cans making it somewhat impossible to conform. However, there's always someone somewhere who will sell under the radar, it's just a matter of finding them. We did so here in the form of a great guy by the name of Wowee who took us everywhere in his car and organised fuel from the army, better quality stuff than we'd have found on the streets (fuel here is notoriously of poor quality).

Topped up with fresh produce and fuel, we set sail for our next stop, Kaluku, 50nm south still trying to find that elusive wind or at least a wind that's not permanently from exactly the direction in which we are heading.

PHOTO GALLERY: