Well it has been very slow. We have had very little wind during the day and 20 knots plus at night time accompanied by thunderstorms and lightning. At least we get some sailing done and save our precious fuel.

At 7am this morning I woke the boat with the proclaimers song 500 miles as that's the distance we have no covered since we left Singapore. We have had two days of repairs though. We tore the main at one of the batten pockets and had to jerry rig one of Askaris sail slides that I have been carrying round for a year. No sooner had we finished repairing that when it was time to change chart cartridges for the rest of Indonesia. Guess what! The only cartridge that doesn't work is the one we need. We have reverted to charts and dead reckoning supported by GPS.

This was followed promptly by the failure of the Racor filter on the "evil" engine. It appears that the previous owner had broken off the drain plug and glued the hole of with something that didn't work so well! This explained why I had to bleed the engines every couple of days. Anyway some epoxy and time, both of which I have lots of it is now repaired and we are motoring along waiting for some wind. At this rate I think that we will have to stop somewhere for fuel. Possibly Maumare or Tanah Bahru. Anyway we are plodding along with the odd hiccups. Thankfully Nazile has been cooking up a storm including banana bread, pancakes_, fried rice, soup etc etc and many other good dishes. So if we dont get any wind we can sit here and get fat waiting for a rescue! May not even ask for assistance until we run out of food! All jokes_ aside we are making good progress Just need some more wind. We have now got under 2000 miles to go!

Day Four has been very slow. The wind would blow for 10 minutes, just long enough for me to get to sleep and then stop requiring me to get up and get the boat back on course. I only got about 30 minutes sleep last night and I am very tired today. The wind today has been on the nose (what little there has been of it) so we sailed at 2 knots until about 2pm and relented by starting the engines. We have a fuel range of about 500 miles so we have to be very careful where and how we use it. We are trying to avoid having to stop in Indonesia to refuel.

The two crew members Mike (a friend of dads) and Nazile from a crewing website on the internet are settling in well. Nazile is a chef and has owned her own bakery and restaurant so we have been eating really well. Mike flew into Singapore from Lake Macquarie. He was very pale when he arrived but is now a shade of pink after 5 minutes out in the sun! They seem to be aclimatising well although the first 4 days has been a mix of sun, rain, lots of wind, no wind etc etc... A real pot pouri of sailing conditions.

All is well but we hope for some more wind from the right direction.

After leaving One-15 Marina we headed out to the "Two Sisters" to clear customs. We waited almost an hour as there were several boats waiting in the queue. Finally the boat arrives to take our passports and check our papers, but there is a problem so the Captain is summoned aboard the customs vessels to explain the discrepancies in the crew papers. We had had a similar discussion when we signed the crew on earlier in the week but I guess no one really understands the black art of Singapore Customs including the customs officials. All sorted out we pack off and head for Australia.

The straits crossing was non eventful and we have a good run. We have been praying that the monsoons will come through early to improve our run to Australia and it seems our prayers have been answered at least for the first day. We arrived at the Southern end of Batam just as the sun was setting and decided to anchor and get some sleep rather than battle the tides. Our speed had fallen to .5 a knot through the water and we still had twenty miles of the Riung Straits to complete.

I awoke at midnight to feel that the tide had changed and the wind had picked up. We set off at a cracking pace and headed out into the rain. It has been raining all day today and we have two 40 knot squalls. But at least we are sailing! The crew is holding up well and we should cross the equator around 7pm tonight. We are 128 nM into the 2400 nM trip to Thursday Island. Maybe after we make an offering to Neptune as we cross the equator we will get some sun but we cant complain as we have had two days of Monsoon winds and hope we get more!