A chat with Solomon
28 January 2009 | South Pacific
Randy

We spent the morning filling scuba tanks and working around the boat. Eric came by and completed some more of his Advanced Open Water certification. He is certainly going to have an awesome and hard to reproduce dive site list in his log (Solomons, PNG, Kapingamarangi, Chuuk, ...).
Later in the day Solomon came by. He brought us some more coconuts and some other tasty items, including a kind of donut that is made out of taro. He took us out to the locations of the WWI era sunken Japanese ship and US fighter plane as well. We spent a lot of time talking and learning more about the Kapinga people. In the end we decided to put it all together into a little cruising guide for Kapingamarangi. Unfortunately they get only one or two yachts visits every few years so it will be of limited use until the FSM allows yachts to check in at Kapingamarangi on their way up to Chuuk or Pohnpei.
We have been having an intermittent problem with one of the legs of AC from the Genset lately. Not long ago I found a burned wire in the 3 way switch and several loose connections. I cleaned that up but I think the switch may have been damaged due to the heat. Have to dig into it deeper to see. (it was the switch, swapped the genset to the shore power side and all is well, need to replace the switch)
Eric cooked dinner aboard Whistler for everyone tonight. He made a great spicy pasta and tomato sauce dish. Pretty impressive for a bachelor. We listened to Canadian, French and French/Canadian music all night (April Wine!) while playing "oh hell", which is kind of like quick and dirty bridge. It was a fun night.