Nongsa Outbound Morning Day 5

Hi everyone,
We motored until about 2100 yesterday evening when a nice WNW breeze filled in enough to allow us to sail. We had an interesting night with quite a lot of traffic passing by. We are now sailing at 3 knots on a course of 130 at 03 21.3S 109 38.0E.

This morning I checked the engine as I always do after a run. I found a small amount of water (less than 50ml) in the bilge under the shaft seal. The seal has never leaked before. As a result we're going to try to minimise our use of the engine, just in case it worsens. When the wind lightens we plan to run the engine and watch the seal carefully, and measure any water leakage after the run. We'd rather keep the engine for essential things like entering marinas etc. That's the bad news. The good news is that the WNW breeze is holding in, and has increased a little.

We're now running goosewinged directly for our next waypoint 400nm away - the passage through the islands 100nm north of Bali. The No 2 headsail goosewings poleless very well with the reaching sheet.

Goosewinged

Last night we were passed by the Mighty Servant 3. It was either a mobile oil/gas platform or a ship lifter carrying a rig. We spoke to them briefly on the radio since they came quite close as they overtook us.