Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

I'm on a boat!

There was a miscommunication about timing. The boat had called me yesterday to tell me that our departure time was being moved up from 1pm to 9am. And my understanding was that they would pick us up at the hotel at that time. They thought we'd be on the boat at that time. There was a concerned driver waiting for us to finish checking out. Turned out to be a hurry-up-and-wait situation anyway. The boat is fresh out of dry dock and they had a myriad of things to take care of before we left. We didn't end up leaving the dock until about noon.

The boat seems pretty nice. Some of the more experienced live aboard divers have said that it seems very nice, so I may be spoiled by the experience. It's a 142ft boat, and 30ft at the beam, which feels quite spacious. Unfortunately, one of the things that they didn't have time to do in dry dock was to replace the boom on the mainmast, so we won't be doing any sailing on this trip. They tell us that we wouldn't have done much anyway, since the boat only makes about 3 knots under sail, and more like 8 using the motor.

We were still alongside Bali when the sun went down. We are expected to cross the Lombok Strait over the next few hours. It's a little rough in the strait, but it seems that I don't get terribly seasick with this amount of motion. I was feeling a bit queasy at dinner, but I think that was because of the diesel fumes in the cabin, not the motion of the boat.