Location: Sorong
The day started very early for me. We had our 4-hour night watch, and it was by far one of my favorite watches so far. We were sailing near Sorong, a big Indonesian city, so we had something called a bow watch. We had someone sit at the front of the boat with a VHF and would guide the boat away from any boats or floating trees. Ethan was doing his shift on bow watch when we got a radio call from the walki where he screams out, “Dolphins”!!! We all run up to the front of the boat, and we don’t see a thing. As we wait in anticipation, all we can see are the thousands of stars in the sky and the reflection of the moon on the water.
Then from right next to the boat, we see three dolphins take off gliding along the surface, leaving an amazing trail of bio-luminescence lighting up their path. Then in the morning, we arrived at our anchor spot in Pulau Yef Dum. It is a major port, and we needed to be cleared by customs from Sorong so that tomorrow we can do our 5-hour sail to Raja Ampat!! Once we anchored, we ate Dray’s banana bread and talked about our plans for the day. The first thing we had to do was un passage, prep the boat and do a boat appreciation. We had to take all the sails down and put sail covers over them and clean the whole deck. Then we did our boat appreciation and cleaned the boat. After that, we ate lunch, and then the customs people arrived on our boat. They had us all lineup and took us one by one and took our pictures, and looked at our passports. After all the customs were finished, we started our scuba rescue training. We watched a long video and took a test. Then we ate dinner, and we ended the day with another amazing sunset.