Drifting through the Banda Sea | S2 Ep23

Hello there, welcome to Sailing NV, We're a sailing family pursuing an unconventional dream of sailing around the world in our recently converted ex Vendée Globe Open 66 race boat. This week we set sail from the small spice island of Banda Neira for a 600nm passage heading south west through the Banda sea to the island of flores, which is part of Indonesia's sprawling archipelago and famous for the Komodo national park on it's western tip. But before we hoisted our sails, we couldn't resist the lure to cross the bay and climb the volcano mount api that had been looming over us all this time. With Mount Api successfully conquered, we were now ready to move on. We had 3 crew members with us for this trip, Stefan who had sailed with us all the way from Vanuatu and Jacob and Abbey who had joined us when we arrived in Tual The trip started out well and we made good progress, taking it in turns to rest and to be on watch, but by the evening of the second day, the wind started to ease and what had started out as a fast sail became more of a drift. And so we drifted through the night and we drifted through the day, and as long as there was food on the table, the captain was happy! It's moments like this when we really miss our big old racing sails. For anyone that's wondering, our last big laminate racing headsail disintegrated on our passage to Indonesia and our 10 year old racing laminate mainsail was toast before we really got a chance to use it, despite our best efforts to patch and reinforce it. Sailing fast isn't the only fun thing about having a race boat, it's also great to have this huge cockpit to live outside in, especially in these tropical areas But slowly slowly we inched our way towards Flores, until by the 4th day there was land in sight and we had just one sunset left at sea before making landfall... 00:00 - Intro 00:40 - Climbing the volcano 01:55 - Setting sail 03:41 - Drifting 06:28 - Land ho! 07:34 - Missing our big sails 08:56 - Arrival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you enjoyed this video please consider supporting us on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/SailingNV or with a one-off donation via https://ko-fi.com/sailingnv or paypal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/sailingnv