ERADICAKE

Never a dull moment around here...my last few days have been jammed with an array of both tedious and wonderful. Starting with the wonderful: afternoon basketball with the locals, a glorious afternoon spent on the windward side of the atoll and drifting back toward Swell under a cloudless night sky with left over spaghetti and a bottle of wine, and teaching my friend Henry's 4-year old daughter, Reaua to swim, snorkel, and paddle a surfboard. In less than a week she's gone from barely putting her face in the water to chasing 'fish families' with me in her mini mask and standing on the nose of my longboard. She's a regular-footer for sure and it's a good thing because she lives directly in front of a right-hander on Christmas Island. After four months here in the Line Islands, I am finally feeling the urge to pack it up --two straight weeks of absolutely NO surf may be the cause. Despite a lack of waves, there are always other tasks to occupy me.

Yesterday I pulled everything out of storage lockers to distribute 'boric acid balls' in Swell's every deep corner to the delightful despair of my cockroach stowaways. Hopefully these deadly treats, a mixture of sweetened condensed milk and boric acid, will mean the end of their extended sailing vacation. Today was spent putting everything back together and then readying my engine for the trip-replacing the alternator belt, changing my transmission fluid, topping off the other engine fluids, changing fuel filters, and soddering a unruly starter wire, and then baking a cake for neighbor Larry's birthday potluck, (not to be confused with my gecko, Larry, who I happily report to be chirping like a songbird everynight.I just hope he doesn't nibble on a boric acid ball). . .I'm covered in motor oil and cake batter, so before I head over to the beach gathering, where the topics of conversation are sure to range in interest from cholesterol counts to eggless cake recipes (part of the amusing diversity of people you hang out with when you're traveling), I'm going to do a drift dive in the pass to get cleaned up. Fortunately, there are hundreds of coconut trees on the beach to climb if I need a quick adrenal fix to enhance my conversational patience.