Day 150, Year 3: Getting Ready for the River Trip
Date: Hari Senin (Monday), Bulan Oktober 6, Pada Tahan 2008
Weather: Just HOT
Location: Kumai River, Kalimantan, Indonesia
We are only two degrees south of the equator and we can surely feel that. Just moving from one spot to another here can cause a severe outbreak of perspiration. So I picked today as a day to bake granola. Not smart, but necessary. And the morning began with a series of repairs. First the whole refrigeration system seemed to have just quit. Mark got out the manual and started tearing things apart to fix the system, but then I had a brilliant thought. Could it be that we had just let the batteries
go too low during the night and that charging the batteries might fix the system? That ended up to be the problem, so that repair was easy. We just started the engine. But then there were other problems. The forward head that Justin and Jo have been using got clogged and while Mark was trying to fix that, the water intake for the engine got clogged. So it was definitely one of those mornings that defines world cruising as repairing your boat in exotic places.
We all did make it to the nearby city of Pangkalan Bun where we had lunch and went to the ATM to sustain our activities and then to the internet café to check in on world happenings. We left Justin and Jo in the internet café and headed back to Kumai to finish our projects aboard Windbird. We also checked in with Harry to make sure that he had successfully made reservations for the kids to fly to back to Java and then on the Bali and to make sure we had given him the necessary paperwork to get
us in and out of the national park. All was well, so we headed back to Windibird to finish the projects we had started in the morning. Justin and Jo got back just about sunset and we had a taco dinner onboard and packed our bags for the river trip.
Tomorrow morning at 7:30 am we take off for our three day trip to see the orangutans. We will not be able to send logs, so the next log will be sent from here three days from now. We expect to have lots of great things to report, so stay tuned.
