Day 16 Cairns-Singapore

- December 23, 2025

Tuesday 22nd Dec '25

So the boys got themselves a couple of scooters and headed off into the bright lights of Bali to meet up with 15 other Estonian's that either live there or arrived for Xmas. They did invite me but I graciously declined as I think I would have felt a bit strange amongst a group of 20 somethings talking a strange langue so I gave them some old person advice about riding scooters around Bali and off they went an hour or so after we landed and cleared in.

Talking of clearing in - OMG!!! I thought the pacific Islands were bad. Roughly a dozen officials came and went in the space of an hour all with paperwork for me to sign. I must have signed 30+ documents in total! There were 5 copies of the crew list, all stamped and signed by different departments plus me. After all these people left my agent went off with passports in hand (never like this process) and said she would be back the next day.

The next day she came back, handed me an A4 size book that had multiple offical looking bits of paper stapled in it all signed (obviously!). This was our "Ships Health" book and part of what was required to clear in. The fact that we didn't get one question about our health just goes to show it is a pointless process that just takes up time, materials and money. She did however hand back our passports.

Then she came back the next day (Sunday) to give me my "Domestic clearance document", this is to depart Bali but only to other Indonesian ports. The reason behind that is between here and Singapore, 1,000nm, it's all Indonesia so if we have an issue, weather, mechanical etc we can just pop into any place without all the international shenanigans we had in Bali. That means we will still need to internationally clear out somewhere so we will pop into an island called Batam which is just across the water from Singapore. ETA into Batam is currently 28th Dec but we will see.

In the photo's below you will see we make the fuel barge along side us look like a tender. It gives you an idea of how, not only long this boat is but how bulky it is, the volume is enormous. I digress, we only took on 3,000lts of diesel not the 9,000lts that would be needed to fill up the tanks because the price was crazy expensive and 3,000 is more than enough to get the boat to Langkawi (via Singapore) where fuel will be half the price.

After all that waffle, we left Bali yesterday Monday 22nd Dec at around 17:00

My original plan was to leave Bali, head west underneath Java and pop north through the gap near Jakarta but I have been a bit suspicious of the weather lately and there are not many places to hide along that coast so decided to leave Bali and head north straight into the Java Sea and north of Java Island. This has it's own problems with way more of my old enemy the fishermen, all the FAD's and a load of crap floating about. The benefits of doing this is we get better weather, smaller sea condition and we save 250nm. Fingers crossed I made the right decision!

A day into it and so far so good.

The Estonian crew, Kaur onboard and Marek on pontoon