Saturday 10 September 2016

Stop 11: Medana Bay, Lombok Island, September 10 2016

The trip to Medana Bay, Marina - Lombok Island took us 7.5 hours from Gili Lawang. We motored all the way. We anchored at 08 21.68S & 116 07.73E  in 20 meters of water using our Google maps overlaid on Open CPN.



You need the way points to enter this area safely as it has many reefs to navigate:

Way-points:
A 08 20.07S / 116 08.36E travelling 242 T to way-point B.
B 08 20.43S / 116 07.69E

Once inside you have 3 choices: anchor, pick up a mooring ball or pull into the 'marina'. The anchoring depths are deep as the moorings have taken up the shallower water, some boats did drag anchor. The moorings you pick up at your own risk. During our time here none of our boats had any issues with the moorings. However, the rally from Darwin who were here a few weeks earlier had a mooring break and a boat drifted into the berthed vessels. The marina is dodgy to say the least. Its very basic, you risk rats climbing aboard, theft (one of our rally boats had its outboard engine stolen here) and its a stern in - drop anchor out the front type berth. We preferred (as we always do) to drop our anchor.

This is the entire marina.



That said, the restaurant has cold Bintangs and great good at a good price. Its a good spot to stop for a while. We only stayed the night as we were running out of time to put in our application for our visa extension and did not want to incur a fine, which at the time was AU$25 a day per person.

Marina/hotel restaurant, with a few of the fleet enjoying a cold beer.




A few of us walked up and out of the marina/hotel grounds and walked through a local community out onto the street in search of data. We all got data and we all had issues once we left Medana. We learnt a lesson here, that is you need to be very exact about the questions you ask when buying data, we do not want local data (unless of course you are staying in the area for a while).

The data shop with some of the fleet buying data.

A caged pussy cat.


Servo - Bensin = unlead petrol.

Egg delivery.

A common form of transport.

A bunch of blokes making bricks - one at a time!





Quite a few of the fleet did some day trips and thoroughly loved it, loads to see here. Some also went over to the Gili's (Trawangan, Air and Meno) which are less than 1 hour away (you can see them) in their own boats and some just chilled and stocked up on supplies. Keep in mind that there is a very good supermarket in town with most things at very good price.

A common sight.




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