Wednesday 18th Dec '24


It’s the early hours of Wednesday morning and I’m the 22:00-02:00 watch. We are still in the super highway current doing 10.5kts when all of a sudden there’s an almighty thud as if we were hit by a big wave but the seas are pretty calm. I suspect we just hit a log floating around. Will have to wait till daylight to see if there was any damage but the good news is that so far none of the 8 bilge pumps has been auto activated which is obvious a good sign.

When daylight came I had a walk around to check as best I could to see if there was any obvious damage and to my relief I couldn’t see any.

Now 02:30 on Thursday morning and we have had a busy Wednesday.
In Indonesia they have a particular fishing method whereby they anchor what can only be described as a shed (see photo) on floats in waters 4-5km deep! Yes you read that right and apparently they use rope. OMG!
Theres a story back in 2019 where an 18yr old Indo fisherman’s shed broke it’s mooring line and drifted for 49 days and thousands of miles before being rescued off Guam.

These guys are miles away from shore and lite up like a Christmas tree at night to attract the fish. Problem is there are hundreds of them. They are hard to see during the day until you are really close and they don’t show up on radar. At night they are each joined by a small fishing boat and 2 little runabouts who don’t have any lights at all. In the morning the fishing boat takes the catch back to shore.

Thankfully we managed to work our way through this maze and around midnight we made it into a shipping lane where they are not allowed. We have about 170nm of shipping lane before we hit the next little group of islands and no doubt some more of our friendly fishing comrades.
Until then we are enjoying the relaxing watches where we only come across ships which are predictable and with recognisable navigation lights!

On another note we crossed over the equator last night! Whoop Whoop! Back in the Southern Hemisphere. It happened around 23:00. It was Kel’s first time crossing and I don’t know what it is but when I crossed it last time with Griff on the Selene 60 it was also in the middle of the night.

I am now 2hrs into my watch without seeing a single vessel - bliss!

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