Lovina Beach, Bali Island, Indonesia

The Lovina Beach beach

Denpasar is the main city on the island of Bali.  This is where the town never sleeps and is a non-stop party.  This is not the kind of place that we like to visit.   

The Rally has a scheduled stop at Lovina Beach on the northwest coast but not for another two weeks.  Lovina is described as 'the place to go to get away from the crowds'.  So that's where we'll go.

Many Hindu statues here

Even the rice field workers are happy to see us

The 'Dolphin' at Lovina Beach

The intermediate anchorage between Lombok and Lovina is a town called Amed.  We arrived there at 1 PM and it turned out to be an unusable anchorage in anything except calm winds and no swell.  We have yet to see those conditions in Indonesia.  There are no other possible anchorages until Lovina, 45 miles away.  That would mean a night arrival to an unfamiliar place with coral reef.  We don't do that.  Period.  So we now had 17 hours to go 45 miles and we were not going to get much sleep watching out for fish traps and unlit boats.  At least we wouldn't hit them very hard going only 2.5 knots.

We arrived at sunrise, tired, and already there was a massive fleet of spider boats heading out to sea.  Some with

The Spider Fleet

nets, some with tourists.  One sailboat was in the anchorage but looked to be abandoned.  We dropped anchor in 20 feet of water on a nice sand bottom in front of a black sand beach.  This is a great anchorage.  The coral reef blocks the easterly swell.  The beach is 50 meters away.  The town is cute and has a backpacker feel to it.  Then, we slept.  The rest of the day was spent onboard catching up on maintenance and catching up with the blog.

Bali is 85% Hindu.  That means there won't be too much noise from the Muslim prayer callers.  Thank you Vishnu

The security factor is very good in Indonesia, in general.  Good thing because there's nowhere close to lock the dinghy.