Sailing, sort of. Wait, definitely sailing. And not.

We left Lovina at around 9am and set sail for Java. The journey will take several days so we’ll sail around the clock, each of the crew taking turn at the wheel on watch.

I had first watch from 9am to noon. We had a bit of wind so we sailed for a couple of hours but by 12:30 the wind was down and the seas were up so we proceeded to motor for a few hours.

The swelling seas persisted throughout the day and all the crew combated churning stomachs the best way we knew how, with frequent catnaps in the hammocks and playing Tropicbird gin.

My second watch started at 6pm and we were still motoring, which is a bit frustrating. So we prepped dinner and sat down to eat. Naturally with dinner on the table the winds finally decided to arrive in force. The boat was spun like a top 90 degrees counterclockwise and the battering began. Frantically the sails were adjusted to take advantage of our new found propulsion.

The wind served us well through the night and into the early hours of morning, which is where I’m writing from. Unfortunately we had to restart the engines at 5am as the wind has again died down and we were bobbing like a 50 ft cork.

Hopefully we’ll find wind again soon. We still have a long way to go at over 200 nautical miles to our next anchor in Semarang.

written 9.26.2013 5:00am