Sunday 9^th October

Last night was Angela (one of Pete’s lovely sisters) and Chris Wood’s 60^th birthday party…back in Tasmania.  We were very sad not to be there.  I had been hoping to make a sudden dash for Tasmania, but it is not easy at all to get a ticket out of Honiara, let alone connecting flights.  Also…it is very expensive and I am saving my airfare money for Christmas.  I am sure it was a wonderful, cheery event.

We celebrated for them by watching…two Rugby World Cup games (France v England, Wales v Ireland,) at the Yacht Club with a large and extremely vocal crowd.  Well when I say ‘we’ watched…Pete and John were in the thick of it all, with the Infinity-ites, at a large round front-of-house table.  I had a long cold shower and snuck off during the first game to send off my blogpost and glance quickly at my emails…(apparently Ireland lost.) 

When I was in the spacious foyer of the Heritage Hotel, sipping on a Corona beer and connecting, via bumblebee (my very user-friendly user name is….enaqbm5b@bumblebee, password uu9dmfnr, all in the tiniest print which I couldn’t read even with my good prescription magnifiers…I had to go to the counter and get the bright young receptionist chap to write it down for me in BIG BOLD PRINT…) I found some emails from Kerry.  The first one was PANIC STATIONS.  Although he had many bags with him, he did not have a very important small fold over black card case containing his credit cards…I am SO glad we didn’t get this email before we left because we would have turned the boat inside out and upside down.  A few days out of cyber reach did wonders – Kerry, thank God, found his card case in a secret pocket, as one, with luck, always does.

During the second game, I sat happily on the sidelines with Sage and baby Rhian, and Patti from Hawaii. We chatted in between roars from the crowd, looked sideways at the game occasionally, and very much enjoyed watching the happy expressions (well Alex and George, from the UK, were NOT happy…) of the audience.  Tasmanian Bruce and James arrived and joined the big table; apparently we are going to repeat the occasion tonight and then all go off for dinner, back to the Golden Crown for more delicious chilli crayfish…

Infinity left during the night, headed for the Russell Islands and then Cairns.  We might catch up with them one more time; we have been with them so often, in so many different places, it will feel very strange, and sad, not to have them looming on the horizon somewhere or another.

Pete has read my last few cyber-offerings and has pointed out that I have missed a few islands and a few people… I did have a few days where it was just impossible, for one reason or another, to get out the computer.  Unfortunately, if I don’t write every single day, everything becomes a blur and all the beautiful islands merge and morph into one another…

I do remember, at some anchorage, meeting a most lovely man, John, a very gentle person wearing a hideously stained and ragged polo-shirt.  He didn’t want to sell or trade, he just wanted to chat.  I noticed he was gazing, in some awe at 2XS, so I suggested to Pete that he invite him aboard.  The four young boys with him, in their own canoes, stat patiently waiting – yes ofcourse I fed them and gave them red cordial – while John came on board and had a guided tour.  He was in his fifties and said he had never before been invited onboard a yacht.  (Most of the Solomon Islanders don’t actually wait for an invitation...they just clamber confidently up the steps and sit on the deck.)  We gave John a drink and some biscuits and he looked very embarrassed.  “You are the guests in my country; I should be inviting you!” he said.  I hated the way he was wearing such scungy rags, this beautiful, dignified man, so I whispered to Pete that it was time to let go one of his favourite white t-shirts.  (Favourite to him but not to me because it has a strange bobbly texture, not discernible to men at all but very unpleasant to me.)  I put it in a plastic bag and slipped it to John as unobtrusively as possible – it is not a good look, to be the Great White Queen bearing gifts and wealth, and his eyes filled with tears, to have some of Captain Pete’s clothing.  (No he won’t notice that it is a bit bobbly in texture!  It is beautifully clean and white!)

Last night when I arrived back from the Heritage Hotel I made my way through the crowd to get a glass of wine.  There was a grizzled Australian man there, a gold miner – I said, “Gold in them thar hills?” and he said, “Yup.”  He was with a very nicely spoken Solomons Islands man, who looked at me very intently and said, “Are you from the yacht out there, which just returned?”  I said yes, and he looked stricken.  “I think you were robbed and attacked the other night?”  I said that was Delos, and Raynad, a few days before, and that we had been fine.  “I am so ashamed,” he said.  “I apologise on behalf of my countrymen.”  Too sad…