Short Overnight at Talulan Bay

After much discussion between the crew, we decided to stop overnight at Talulan Bay. Dave didn't want to have to navigate the prolific small fishing boats (with flashlights for lights) and FAD's all night long. And we both wanted to be able to see some of the coast we were passing by.

So just at sunset, we stopped in Talulan Bay. We had one waypoint on the western side of the bay, but we chose an anchorage in the southern end of the bay--away from the town. The problem in finding an anchorage was--as usual in these parts--it was either over 100 ft deep or 3 feet deep (and the light was fading fast. We managed to find a spot with a little more shelf and dropped our anchor.

We nosed in cautiously with Dave on the bow as lookout, and me on the depthsounder with my hand on "reverse". As soon as we got down to 10 feet, I dropped a waypoint and we reversed out of there. We then dropped our anchor far enough from the waypoint to make sure we had swinging room. The shelf went from 12 ft to 35 ft to 75 feet in about 100 feet, so it was tricky. We finally dropped in about 50 ft and let out 150 ft of scope (all chain, with a 100 lb anchor).

We had a bit of a squall pass overhead during dinner--we were protected from any wind, but we had frequent lightning for an hour or so.

The rest of the rally people that left with us kept going. The wind is supposed to pick up a little today from the SW (too close to sail), so they all wanted to keep going and get south before things picked up. Only 2 or 3 boats are behind us now--Carina and Sidewinder leaving the marina this morning, and Helena, who was supposed to have left yesterday afternoon.

We set the alarm for 5am, and were underway by 5:25--we've got 66 miles to go to the next stop (Balut Islands, off the southern tip of Mindanao), and sunset is at 5:45pm. So we are pushing hard to get there before dark (right now our ETA is 6:30pm :( ) We have good Google Earth photos of the anchorage, and there should be a number of rally boats stopping there tonight, so hopefully we'll have some help getting in if we arrive after dark.

It's a beautiful morning motorsailing in light winds and slight seas along the coast. All the Filipino fishermen are out in force in their tiny canoes--we counted 20 within sight at 5:30am (and they'd probably been out fishing all night).

And the best thing is--the Philippines have GSM (cell) data, so we have pretty decent internet right now.

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