Futuna Is

Well, if you'll indulge me, I'll backtrack a bit to Futuna, which was the starting point of our 18-day sail to Bundaberg.

Futuna is...

...the kind of place where you go to check in with Customs, and come away with the lei that the Customs official had been wearing.  This has to sum up everything that I love about Polynesia - it's the place where strangers give you flowers.

Futuna was Alisa's very favorite stop on the whole crossing.  It's a little French dependency northeast of Fiji that gets only about 25 yachts a year, and almost no non-yacht tourists.  People were incredibly friendly and helpful and eager to interact with us.

By the time we reached Futuna we were starting to get a little dazed from all the travel we've crammed into the last six months, and our photography suffered from the travel fatigue.

 But I did get a pic of Elias in the back of a pickup on a hitchhiking foray around the island.  We're going so fast, he said.

Futuna is at 14° South, and I found the heat to be a bit insufferable - check out my sweat-soaked t-shirt.


Lucklily, we could swim off the boat every day.

Elias discovered the joys of jumping off the jupe.

And, as always, we had lots of chores to attend to.

I hauled water.

And we made a new cage to keep the escape artist safely in his bunk at night.

We pulled the jib down on deck for a bit of sewing.

And Alisa did some laundry.

With all that to take care of, it's not surprising that I never got around to drinking kava with the men.

Hopefully we'll go back some day when we have a little more time...

The end.