Merry Christmas Everyone!!

We took a break from our boat chores yesterday afternoon to join a Cruiser Christmas Eve get-together. We played "pick a present" ... everyone brings an inexpensive gift, and you pass a dice around the table. When you roll 6, you get to go pick a present from the table. The next time you roll a 6, you MUST swap your gift with someone else's. The hot gift at our table was a hand-written gift certificate from David of s/v Equinox, who promised to come make a gourmet Italian meal aboard your boat. In Fiji, there are lots of restaurants, but none that would come close to "gourmet Italian". That envelope got traded for about 20 times before we stopped passing the dice around the table.

Today we are going to Curly's houseboat for a small potluck.

Chores we have completed since returning to Soggy Paws two days ago:
- Big solar panels mounted back on the arch
- Dinghy launched & outboard on
- Refrigerator & freezer swabbed out and started up
- 4 large suitcases full of stuff unpacked and mostly stowed
- Enough groceries purchased to get us through Christmas week

My next huge task is to tackle the cupboards. While we were gone, we were occupied by a colony of spiders, and they and the 'cupboard moths' I was already struggling with, have waged World War III in my cupboards. They are a mess!! I have to pull everything out, kill the spiders and the moths, and salvage what's salvageable from the dry goods in the cupboards. Everything is covered in moth bodies and spider poop (the moths are losing the war)!! Nearly every spider I have encountered is a big momma protecting an egg sac (ie, 1,000 new spiders), so the sooner I get to this, the better.

Dave's first priority is to track down the source of the fresh water leak. We can hear our fresh water pump come on, when neither of us has been using water, so we have a slow leak somewhere.

The weather here right now is pretty benign--very low wind and hot and sunny (think Florida in June). If we didn't have so much boat cleanup to do, we should be out diving!!! This kind of weather is exactly why we stayed in Fiji for the summer.

On the weather front, there is a new Low showing up in the 10 day forecast, spinning up over the Solomon Islands and heading south and east. Hopefully it will go right on past Fiji--it's still too early to start worrying.