After a rest day in Smithers, I got back on the road, bracing myself for long stretches of solitude. Winter, which had been relatively...
June 14, 2017
While writing this post, I got a double feeling about the past expedition. First of all I would like to thank Koen De Gezelle and Malcolm Cockburn for the great support for the start and continuation of this expedition. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to do this. The same goes for my sponsors, they give me such great support in many ways. Another major thank you goes to friends, family and my girlfriend who kept on helping out or just even anybody sending me a message for support in the difficult time of waiting for the boat. I’m happy to get this support and this really is a ‘human powered’ adventure, people from all around the world are helping and achieving this! Here is a short summary how those last 2 weeks of rowing were going.
After waiting a couple of days for the new moon, we departed from the vila alba resort to the most eastern point of north Bali. An easy day and we decided to stay there for 2 or 3 more days depending on the weather and then cross to Lombok. The harbour master gave us our blessings when we payed him a visit and showed him how well prepared we where with all safety equipment….
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The 30th of May we started to row in the morning around 9 am, we want to get our planning right with the tides so we should be halfway at slack tide. I was very excited about this crossing since I heard and read so many things about it, especially the strong currents and traffic concerned me. I was fully motivated to get a full day of rowing and suffering. Everything went really well and we were able to keep our course easily. We headed up north east to go southeast again to Gili Trawangan. After an hour or 2 one of the speedboat ferries came straight at us. I got a bit scared but they changed their course in the right moment. Those guys knew we where on the water that day so they actually paid us a visit to wave at us and continue. Luckily there wasn’t too much of traffic and we never had to wait for safe passage. The whole crossing went a lot smoother than expected but off course thats due to the right conditions and decision making. After rowing a bit more than 6 hours we reached Gili where we take a well deserved rest day.
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During this rest day we try to find out where we still would be able to get to. Our visas expire on the 15th and we need a safe place to store the boat for a couple of months. The further we get the more difficult it is to find that. We decide to still push on to Sumbawa, the next island after Lombok. I found a resort there that is willing to store the boat there. The next couple of days go with ups and downs, when there is no wind we do easily 45km, despite the high temperatures and the burning sun. But when there is wind it’s mainly a headwind, slowing us down. One day we had strong winds, rowed for 8hrs non stop and had a progress of about 30km. Good things are that we get to see so many amazing things on our way; crystal clear water with such a beautiful marine life like dolphins and such. It makes me think again we should put more effort to protect these beautiful environments.
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This almost 3 month expedition has learnt me a lot. First of al it showed me once more not to give up that easily. This whole Vayamundo 7 summits is one of the biggest human powered adventures ever. Nobody did this before so things don’t always go as planned, that is adventure. I’m happy I didn’t give up (I was really close) and actually still made this progress. This first rowing expedition gave me a good first experience for the further stages and planning accordingly. For now I’m happy being back in Belgium, back to my friends, family and girlfriend. It were mentally a hard couple of months and I need some break in that. But soon I’ll get back into preparing the next phase of this great adventure….
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