No Christmas on Christmas Island

My last post was from Tahiti since then we have had some good times and some awsome times!

We started of with visiting many islands in the Sociaty island group, thats the same group of islands around Tahiti and its very touristy, a bit like comin g back to the Carribean. Naturaly nature is a bit less intesesting and a bit more poluted. Despite this we somehow managed to entertain ourselfs.

Typical resort, this is probably from Morea maybe? They all look the same...

Halloween was celebrated with a pumpkin on the compass.

The rays are kind of tame in some places due to the resorts feeding them. While it's not exactly natural behavior for the rays it's great fun to feed them small pieces of anchovies.

My is showing off her French swimming suits and matching limp baguette.

The last island in the group we visited was Bora Bora, it's often found on lists of the world's most beautiful places but is a bit over-exploited for me. Anyway I managed to get Covid for the first time despite no less than 3 vaccinations so I spent a lovely couple of days with 40C fever in the tropical climate.

Then it was finally time to increase the level of adventure. Our cunning plan was to sail north across the equator for 2 weeks to Christmas island in Kiribati where we should arrive just in time for Christmas. The crossing was fine, mainly good weather but when we arrived at Christmas island it was closed for Covid and no amount of begging and "wont somebody think of the children!?!" could change their minds. The thing was that we had previously contacted the health authority of Kiribati and they had assured us that the country was open and no problem with Covid. Unfortunately Christmas island had not informed anyone that they were closed. It's not their problem if people spend 2 weeks sailing in vain and the children miss christmas. But I'm not bitter :D

Notice the piece of land in the background, that's how close we

were allowed to Christmas island.

We had to sail south south again without stepping ashore and after another equator crossing and 2 more weeks of sailing we arrived in American Samoa just in time to celebrate New year

New years eve 2022 with our friends from S/Y Champagne

A nice yellowfin tuna I got on the crossing, as usual we released it back alive after a quick pic.

We catch and eat a lot of small tuna too on the crossings. Here is my favourite Sashimi, sometimes we make sushi too but its a lot more work so usually we have a lot of sashimi instead.

In American Samoa we met some new friends and celebrated Mollys 8th birthday.

American Samoa is a fairly modern place since it's a colo... no I mean an "Unincorporated Territory" of USA. I struggle to understand exactly what it means but apparently free schools and free healthcare is provided to the citizens so it seems like a fairly good deal.

The harbour was another story. Incredible proverfull katabatic winds and poor holding combined with a very noisy diesel power station and murky water didn't make it my favorite place but the icing on the cake was the man eating bull sharks that took the leg of a diver just 2 weeks before our visit

AS has a large frog population. The children found no prince but it wasn't for lack of trying.

After a couple of weeks in AS we sailed north again for Kiribati's capital Tarawa. The crossing was once again 2 weeks across the equator which gave us the really fun statistics for December-January: 3 equator crossing, 4500nm and we crossed the dateline so many times back and forth I lost count.

Aaaanyway after a lot of sailing our flag looks like something brought home from the battle of Poltava (Sweden vs Russia, ended badly)

Tarawa, the capital island of Kiribati lived up to our expectations, friendly people and a terribly dirty and overcrowded atoll. We left as soon as we could and found PARADISE in the atoull Butaritari.

As soon as we got ashore we very invited to a wedding. Totaly normal stuff, just invited to a large wedding the next day and beeing treated like guests of honor

Our children posing with the happy couple.

In Butaritari life hasn't changed much for a while. Here is a local fisherman in his outrigger canoe.

Dancing on the wedding feast, hips were shaken so the palm blades flew. Anything on four legs was cooked and served (including the dogs)

After the wedding we borrowed a hut on an uninhabited island and really chilled out for a week

Activity level maximum

Most things were great but we had a problem with dirty drinking water. This is actually the water we drank for 3 weeks, it really looked like that but tasted OK and didn't make us sick. Probably some mud in the water we filled on AM that caused it.