Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

There are lots of boats here in Majuro. I think there were about 30 boats for Christmas dinner at the Tide Table restaurant. We had a pot luck out back on their back porch. It is a hotel too, so it was really in a meeting room/patio sort of thing. The local yacht club sprung for two turkeys and a ham. Then we brought the rest. I made stuffing and Trinda made 2 chocolate cakes. It all went purty good. I ate so much I got sick again, just like Thanksgiving! Ha!

We played the gift giving game. Everyone brought one gift. We drew numbers to see what order to select and open them. After Trinda got to go first, all the rest of us had the option to steel someone else's gift or select a new one to unwrap. Trinda had hers stole twice and me once. When it is stolen, you can either steel again or open. I had a nice LED flash light for a few minutes. I ended up with a squid jig. Trinda got a collection of perfumes.

We moved from anchor to a buoy. There are good newer buoys for $3/day and questionable ones for $1 to $2. We are planning to fly to Seattle and Texas for a few weeks so we took one of the good buoys. It is in 115 feet of water. The deepest buoy I seen! The anchorage was only about 50 feet with good sand holding. I had a little trouble getting the anchor up, but it was just white sand drifting off it when it came up.

The weather here is fine. We get a light sprinkle almost ever day, but so far not enough to fill the tanks. The trade winds seem to blow 15 to 20 most of the time, but the town is in the east end of the lagoon, so there is no fetch. It is nice here. The club got together and put in half a dozen buoys at two other motus in the lagoon, both less than a couple hours away. Several boats went out to them for the time between Christmas and New Years.

There is a big 'block party' scheduled for New Years Eve. They block off the main street and have several live bands in addition to the usual stuff. We are looking forward to it.

There is WiFi available in the anchorage, but it is quite expensive so far. We can carry the computer up to the restaurant and if we buy something its free WiFi. It is a pain to do so. If I don't get the photos uploaded, I'll take them to Seattle and do it there. Looking back through them, I see that I didn't do so well as a photographer!