The Wind Decides | A Story of the Selatan Jong Race, Teluk Bakau 2026

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Words and imagery by Michel Lippitsch. Michel helped set up the Jong School in Bintan, nurturing the next generation of artisans and enthusiasts. His passion for Jong racing and dedication to keeping these traditions alive is really inspiring. Each year, he organises bi-annual Jong races, ensuring that this beautiful cultural heritage continues to thrive. We're proud to sponsor these events and support Michel's efforts in celebrating and preserving Bintan's rich maritime culture.

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A jong, if you've never seen one, is a small wooden sailboat, carved by hand, no

bigger than a child is tall — raced unmanned across shallow water, steered by

nothing but the set of its sail and the skill of whoever built it.

Two things govern every race day here, and neither of them can be argued

with: the wind, and the tide. Everything else — when we race, how wide the

beach is, whether a boat sails true or breaks — gets decided by these two long

before anyone picks up a jong. And yet no two years are ever quite the same

river. The wind that carried last year's race turned northerly halfway through,

in the middle of what should have been steady Selatan season — a reminder

that even a forecast checked on three different apps is really just a polite

guess.

Indonesia doesn't really have four seasons. It has two winds. The northeast

monsoon blows from December through late March, damp off the Indian

Ocean, and the rains come with it. The southwest monsoon arrives as early as

June and holds through September, dry off the Australian continent, and the

country dries out behind it. Our races are named the old way — after the

direction the wind comes from that season. The Utara race sails under that

northeast wind. The Selatan race sails under the southwest wind that follows.

Teaching the academic half of a youth course, I keep learning this alongside

the kids — that a wind compass in the West is a pragmatic thing, four cardinal

points and done, while Indonesian navigators kept their own names for the

wind between the points, the northeast and the southwest carrying their own

words, their own weight.

Tide runs on its own clock, separate from the wind's. Pasang is the water

rising. Surut is the water falling, the sand widening, the seagrass bed drying

into flats you can walk across. This year the tide was right, but the navigable

window was narrow — ten in the morning to six at night — which shaped

everything else about how the day had to run.

Tomorrow is the Selatan race.

That's what I kept telling myself the evening before, watching it come

together on the shore of Teluk Bakau. This year, for the first time, we really managed to fold the kids into the pre-race preparation itself — not a separate lesson off to the side, but the real thing, happening around them. The

different kelompok gathered to set the next day's lineup. Some had already

unloaded their jongs and staked out their patch of beach, and without wasting

time, they were out practicing the course, hunting for the particular angle the

wind wanted, fine-tuning rigs against it. Twenty-three groups came this year

— Batam, Penyengat, Dompak, Teluk Sebong, Tanjung Siambang, Teluk

Bakau, and more from around Bintan and Tanjung Pinang. Limiting each

group to ten jongs let that many in without turning the day into something

unfinishable.

We had funding for twenty kids. We taught closer to twenty-five, once my own

daughter and a few of her friends folded themselves into the group — nobody

was going to turn them away. They watched the big adult jongs being readied

nearby, watched the pickup trucks unloading hull after hull from each

kelompok, before it was their turn to hold a small training jong into the wind

for the first time.

What struck me most, watching the grown boats come off those trucks, was

how many new ones there were. Slightly bigger. A slightly greater ratio of

mast to hull, built to carry a bit more canvas. New sails, cut clean. Everyone

had brought their best boat this year. I'll admit to a small, private regret

watching them — mine is old now, semi-retired, still sailing but not really

competitive anymore. A new generation of real racers is coming up, and it

shows. There were more wrinkles from the sun on the old faces than I

remembered, some kelompok now in matching racing kit with their team's

name printed across it, others as traditional as the day the school started. The

new jongs themselves are leaner than the old ones — less decorated, less

"punk," a cleaner style taking hold. That's evolution, I suppose, happening in

real time on a beach in Bintan.

Every one of those hulls, old or new, started the same way: a piece of pulai

wood, cut and left to dry for a month or two before anyone dares shape it.

Rush that step and you're already building a bad jong. Once cured, the hull is

drawn out by hand and hollowed as thin as the wood allows without losing its

strength — until what's left is light enough to fly. The wind held close to 10 to 14 knots through the day — fast, exciting, and

genuinely beautiful, the kind of conditions a photographer dreams about. And

the beauty of it is something we protect on purpose. There are no cigarette

banners here, no bank logos, none of the usual noise that sponsorship drags

onto an event like this. We'll take sponsors' money gladly — it's what keeps

this running — but not at the cost of hurting the eye. Call it artist's snobbery if

you like, but the setting matters. The attention belongs on the art of the racing jong and the people sailing it, not on what's printed behind them. Picture a sacred Balinese ceremony strung with noodle-brand advertising

flags, and you'll understand exactly what we're trying to avoid. It's a difficult

balance to hold, and we only manage it because just enough sponsors, year

after year, are willing to show up quietly and let the boats be the only thing

anyone's looking at.

This year, after some searching for hands to sail them, two of my older jongs

went out with new racers at the helm — both well past twelve years old

themselves, boats and sailors alike, and I loved watching them race

regardless. Aji, who's become genuinely good, helps keep the fleet

maintained and is close with Hassim, who years ago helped build a healthy,

honest rivalry with Zakir in the school's earliest days. Darto, who's worked on

Nikoi Island since building first started there, bought a jong of his own this

year and raced it for the first time — he named it Nikoi Island, after the place

and the sponsor both. Nikoi has backed us for years now and never once

asked for a logo hung anywhere. That kind of sponsor is rarer than it should

be.

Darto and his Jong boat

The jury has changed almost as much as the boats. These days it runs on

printed sheets, laptops, handheld radios relaying calls from the water to the

starting line, a man stationed at the finish with a camera running to settle any

dispute before it starts. In the earliest years, everything was done by hand —

someone cutting little paper slips and writing each result out one at a time.

We've kept roughly the same number of people on the jury even as the job

itself needs fewer hands, so a fair few now spend the day sitting comfortably,

enjoying themselves more than working. There's something almost quietly

socialist about it — everyone paid the same, whether the job that day was

essential or mostly ceremonial, because friendship counts, seniority counts, a

little harmless corruption and quiet negotiation counts as good sport around

here. Seen up close, it's a strange and genuinely extraordinary lesson in how

a small society organises itself. A total system, if you want to call it that. How

far down that rabbit hole do you want to go? Honestly, you have to be there to

even start to understand it.

All the senses fill up on a day like this, including the ones that don't show up in

any official record — salt, colour, the smell of algae drying on the sand, wind,

water, the constant flap and snap of sails catching and losing the breeze all at

once. A symphony that has nothing to do with music and everything to do with

paying attention. The sails do the rest, letting each jong lift almost off the

water, flying more than sailing.

Schools came again this year too — some purely to watch, others to help. One

team spent the morning cleaning the beach. Another looked after the visiting guests. We tried QR codes for the first time, a small piece of the modern world

stitched into a very old one. That evening, the traditional dangkung played on

the same sand as electro and avant-garde performance, one dissolving into

the next without anyone treating it as strange. Among it, the kids' group took

the floor themselves, performing a choreographed dance led by Dwi. They'd

been rehearsing for almost two weeks straight for it — building, in that time,

an entire small tale of wind and waves and sea, but also of secrecy, and magic,

and simply being together, which is really what the whole day is about

underneath everything else.

By evening, the fleet was back on the sand, salt-crusted, sails down. The same

wind that carried the whole day would keep shifting with the season, the way

it always does, and somewhere around March or April it would swing back

around toward the north, and it would be time again to start thinking about

the Utara race. The tide would rise and fall exactly the same the next

morning, indifferent to who'd won.

None of this is really about nostalgia. It's closer to a reminder: that this

coastline has always been a maritime place, that wind and tide shaped how

people here lived long before anyone wrote it down, and that a small wooden

boat, raced by a kid on an August afternoon, is still part of that same story — a

slightly different boat, a slightly different kid, the same river never stepped in

twice. We're not trying to keep any of it behind glass. We're trying to keep it in

people's hands, one season, one tide, one kid at a time.

Let's keep this going.