Small Fishing Banka at Sea

We had left early (06:30) from our anchorage in Dumaran Island as we had a long trek to make to our next hidey hole from the weather in Cabulauan Island.  A distance a little over 55 nautical miles but we knew it was going to be too hard on the wind and we expected a contrary swell, miserable!

We got out ok (this anchorage was full of shallows and we had run aground the night before) and were making reasonable time with a 2 metre swell hitting us at about 30 degrees off the bow and a 20 knot breeze  about 50 degrees off the bow creating another swell.  A bit lumpy sort of speak.  I had just dipped below to check the engine at 12:30 when Pauline called me back on deck.  Up ahead was a small fishing banka (boat in Filipino) similar to the ones we have seen on our travels up here.  But what was he doing out in this weather?  It looked like one of the small ones that are paddled as opposed to having a motor.  We were easily 20 miles from land.  As we approached our hearts sank, for this banka was swamped and no one was aboard.  We began looking for someone and noticed there was no other debris floating around so we assumed that it had been abandoned a while ago.  It was many miles upwind to the nearest island where they could have set out from.  But we kept a eye peeled and said a silent prayer that if someone was out there alive we would spot him,  But for several miles we did not find any debris, which made us speculate that the boat could have been lost from shore during one of the recent storms which had been responsible for our unsettled weather.  Or we had also notice that sometimes the larger motorized bankas towed some of these smaller ones behind to have more boats on a fishing area.  Maybe it had just broken free and lost.  In any case, our thoughts are for the people who belonged to this boat.  If, as we hope, they are indeed safe, they still will suffer the huge loss of their income supply as the people in this region are so poor the loss of one of these boats would impact them severely.  We thought about trying to tow it to our next destination but that would have meant jumping overboard to secure a line and then we were not sure how to tow it safely in this weather.

It does make us think how fragile things are around us and how lucky we are.  We didn’t complain about the weather once after that and appreciated Sari Timur was taking us on to our next destination in relative safety.

Small Bankas Similar to the Half Sunk One We Saw