Today is the 23rd September and I can no longer claim to be anything less than middle aged. Sadly, it's my 45th birthday... but on the bright side, we broke our all-time 24 hour distance record over night - 181 miles covered to 6am! The crossing from Bali to Cocos Keeling has been fairly uneventful, with good winds out of the South East most of the time. The sea is getting a bit rolly, but when the current is with us by up to 2 knots, we are not going to complain.
I finally managed to get some sleep last night after a couple of days without sleep. I still have no idea why I can't sleep on some passages, whilst on others I seem to sleep fairly well. I think I just get used to the 8 hours sleep at night in port and find adjusting to a broken sleep pattern a bit tricky. I had hoped that by now I would be sleeping like a baby on all passages, but I guess I have to resign myself to a first few exhausting days at sea.
We have had limited contact with the rest of the fleet, as they are all a few hundred miles ahead. Peat Smoke is about 100 miles behind us, but we couldn't even hear them on our SSB Radio last night. This is especially frustrating having just spent a lot of money to have the reception fixed in Darwin. We gave the guy a basic budget to work to, but in the end he presented us with an invoice 4 times our budget, promising the reception would be improved. We are naturally very pissed off to find there is no real improvement. I sent Navcom (the company that did the work) and email, expecting they might offer some money back or something, but of course no reply. We can only advise future cruisers not to try and get any SSB radio work done in Darwin!
Our last night in Bali was great - Mike (formerly of Wind Dancer) invited us out to a dinner show at the Hyatt in Sanur. This is where Heather's brother stayed with his wife when they were visiting, so we were familiar with the place - very nice indeed it is too. Catching up with Mike was great, and the food was wonderful. Mike took a photo of us with the Balinese dancers, which we'll load up to the gallery eventually. The dance was a bit surreal; called the Kuchuk dance it mostly consisted of blokes waving their arms about and shouting Chuk! Chuk! together. There were a few other characters in elaborate dress, but the action was too enigmatic and complicated to me to follow (Heather claims she understood it all...). It's sad to see Mike leave the ARC - it seems at every port now we lose more of our favorite people!
Cocos Keeling promises to be a good stopover, and as the re-start there is not until Tuesday 2nd October, we should have the better part of a week to explore. I've heard the scuba diving and snorkelling is good, so we won't be short of diversions. There is also the Aussie Rules Grand Final on Saturday at the local pub to look forward to, so I can get a final hit of Aussie culture before we slip back into the opposite side of the world.