These same kids carve their own surfboards and spend hours paddling canoes made from dugout trees.

These same kids shape bows and arrows, taking them into the forest to shoot pigeons.

These same kids primarily eat boiled plantain banana and sweet potato sourced from their garden.

The village of 400 people has one miniscule shop stocked with cooking oil, rice, and a few other miscellaneous items. Their houses have no paint. They are made from coconut fronds and materials from the adjacent forest. Each family has their own garden. Occasionally they open a tin, or a plastic package and if they bury it, it rusts away and infiltrates their water source. For Joselwyn this is the pollution they need to eradicate. Also they need to minimise the fires they use to cook their food. They must work hard so that the sea doesn’t continue to rise. So they don’t have to leave behind the place they have dwelled for many generations.

But could they really do better, and would it make a difference?

To Joselwyn I say—I am more to blame than you are, for the sea that rises by your village. I’m sorry Joselwyn. I’m so sorry.

We stopped at the eastern head of the sound to watch a pod of dolphins teaching their young uns how to swim. They brought their flipper out of the water but forgot to stop flipping through the air. Pretty cute watching them splash down on top of the water awkwardly. Some of the bigger dolphins cruised up to the dingy and rode the bow wake for a while, obviously checking us out and protecting the little guys. Then the babies started practicing their aerials. Definitely an ‘I feel lucky to be alive’ moment. Dolphins always seem like they’re having a whale of a time, or I guess a dolphin of a time? Waaa didn’t take the camera that day.

And a few more sailing into Honiara. An easy overnight moonlit passage from Marau Sound.

Sailing to Marau

Boys coming to give us coconut

Paddle board splashers

Frequent visitors

Kustom house

Village soccor

Confederate anchored

We sailed from Santa Cruz to Santa Ana, a distance of 240 miles. The trip was super pleasant, with 10 knots behind us. The island of Santa Ana is a good one for a solid walk ashore, we spent a couple of hours walking to the other side of the island and back, visiting a traditional kastom house which housed carvings that had been there for hundreds of years.

One of the main carvings we saw was of a half man, half shark. One of the legends of the Solomons tells the story of two brothers who fought to the death. The villagers took off after the older brother and he waded into a rock pool and was later seen with a sharks head and a man’s body, forever banished from the village as his punishment.

Confed surrounded by Canoes in the Anchorage

Coordinates of anchorage 10 deg 39.453 S, 166 deg 03.517 E

Highlights

• Surfing with the kids from the village, them on their homemade surfboards, bad ass. I wish we had some photos! But here’s a photo of some of the fellas we met up with ashore another day.
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  Our gang of tour guides

• Landing a huge Mahi mahi as we came in the passage
• Trading, trading and more trading, we have been short of nothing here. We gave half the mahi mahi to the village when we arrived which was well received and got us off to a good start with people. This is a super friendly place.
  

  A typical veggie hall

• Meeting Joselwyn who became our local tour guide eager to show us ALL the sites of Kala bay. He’s a Chinese football player? Will have to google that one when we get back to civilisation.
• Spending the day fixing our kite gear in preparation for the Louisiades. Many intrigued onlookers.
• The anchorage – so calm!
• A walk around to black beach (about 4km from anchorage) where there’s a wide pool of a river opening onto the sea. A competitive stone skimming competition ensued with the local kids. Unfortunately they were vastly more skilled than us. We ended up watching them go head to head at a variety of games that they’ve clearly been playing since infancy. One involved a large group of boys throwing stones as high as they could at the same time. First stone in the water loses, last stone wins.

Throwing competition

They’re all so at home in their surroundings, climbing up trees and jumping/somersaulting into the river

Shooting birds with bows and arrows

Dude

• Snurfelling – It’s a new sport that involves attempting to surf at low tide whilst checking water depths and fish life. A bit about the surf break – it’s a right hander on the edge of the entrance channel, easy paddle out, pretty shallow at low tide so you need to know what you’re doing. At high tide two wave patterns add together and it doesn’t break as cleanly. Apparently the best months are January – March when Joselwyn tells us it breaks like the photos he’s seen in magazines in Aus. Sorry no photos!
• Visiting the kindergarten.
  

  With Doris the kindy teacher

  

  The kindy

  

  Coconut birds made by the kids

  

  Cute uniforms!

Kala Bay turned into one of our favourites of the trip so far

Getting an early morning canoe ride

Mass beetle nuts

Migs and Andrew the unofficial chief of the village

The gang waving goodbye after their tour of Confederate

School

Medical center

Typical House Kala Bay

A torch battery was the agreed trading price. We invited them aboard, forcing tea and biscuits into them and lending a jacket to Florence before they took off. She was wet through but would be waiting in the dugout canoe spotting for Thomas for the next 4 hours, committed to the crayfish hunt.

At about midnight another knock rippled through the hull. The dugout was back, along with 5 crayfish, and about 20 small reef fish. We gratefully accepted the crayfish, and told Florence and Thomas to cook up the fish themselves. It’s always a good night when you get a midnight delivery of crayfish. Thanks Manyano Bay!

Coordinates – 10 deg 40.363 S, 165 deg 52.053 E

Anchoring Manyano

The reef passage into the anchorage is best negotiated at low tide with direct sunlight so you can see the reef on both sides. This a great place to fill up with water as there’s a hose in the shallows which you can take your dingy up to. They’d love to get some more visitors!

Highlights

• The voyage from Bottom Bay in Lata to Manyano with Titus and his family, as well as their entire house. (They were moving back to his wife’s Margarets village and thought Confederate would be a good moving van)
  

  Helping Titus move house

  

  Sibling love

• A nice tuna caught just outside the reef near the anchorage.
• A 4 mile walk through vivid green jungle to Margaret’s village. The track is really nice and you could walk all the way around the island if you wanted although it would take you about a week.
  

  Laundry Solomons styles

• Kids paddling out to us and capsizing their dugout canoes to form a swimming platform.
  

  Sunset swimming

  

  Canoe kids

• Using Confederate as a diving platform with some of the local kids.
  

  Taking the kids out to Confederate

• Visiting the school where Margaret will be teaching kindy.
  

  The school at Manyano

• The helpful tour guides that appeared whenever we wanted to go walking. Sarah, a local lady who joined me one day had minimal English. At one point she pulled at my hat and I thought I had something in my hair. I paused nervously waiting for her to drag out a massive spider or something similar. However it turned out she was merely inserting a small plant clipping that new visitors to an area are supposed to wear for protection.
  

  Jungle walking with Sarah

• Frequent visits from the local chatterbox, Tusi, ending in us taking him out for his first day sailing experience.
  

  Tusi and his gardening gang

• 12pm Crayfish delivery from Thomas and Florence.
• As an aside we have hardly had to buy anything so far in the Solomons. We’ve traded everything imaginable. Today it was couple of old magazines for a dozen sweet potato, bananas and papaya, and a local surf guide. Not bad. In Lata, a memory stick of movies we gave Charles earned us sweet potato, limes, oranges, lemon leaf (for tea), and lettuce. Exercise books have been a hit with the kids who bring us coconut, cucumber, and guava in exchange. Possibly our worst trade has been guitar strings for beans, but that guy was super nice.

Typical sailing canoe

Beetle nut chewing session at Margarets house

Cousins

Cute

Titus was based in Honiara, working on a fishing boat. On his day-off he was traveling on a congested local bus up the coast. Amidst the crowded bus he spotted Margaret and her companions a couple of rows back. He recognised they were also from the Santa Cruz Islands. They started chatting, talking about the villages they had left behind for work in Honiara. They said goodbye as they got off the bus. And that was that.

Later that day Titus was at the market. He’d bought some fruit and was sitting on a grass area behind the market feasting on the fruit. Margaret approached, and gave him some bananas. She asked if he was single. He said he already had a girlfriend from another island.
She asked, “Why do you want to be with that girl who is all the way in Malaita?” He considered this, and phoned his father to discuss the matter. His father was happy for him to marry Margaret as they had mutual friends and knew some of Margaret’s family. So that was that.

3000 Solomon Islands Dollars was the agreed price. Dudley (Titus’ father) raised the money with the help of others in their village and gave the amount to Margaret’s family. It took some time to raise the money but those who contributed would also have any future children named after them.

Here’s a picture of Titus, Margaret, Shonta, Lawrence, Elton and baby .

Lured by the chance to experience some culture and Solomon’s cuisine we gratefully accepted Paul’s invitation. Embarrassingly by virtue of being the only white New Zealanders in town Robin and I found ourselves mentioned in every speech as well as positioned at the head table for the feast, next to the bishop and other dignitaries. The day started at 730am with a two-hour church ceremony – I say ceremony and not service as the whole occasion was a well-executed performance of candle lighting, singing, chanting, sermon and praying. A lady and young boy clothed in red and white regalia distributed smoke over the congregation to add to the atmosphere. The Anglican missionaries seem to have exceled in their conversion of the entire Graciosa bay.The whole community was involved, even the well-dressed kids coming forward for their bread and wine at the end of the service – their frizzy hair somewhat tempered for the occasion.

We emerged from the church slightly sore from the fifteen minutes kneeling on the concrete floor in pidgin English prayer. As we were in the front row it was hard to escape the watchful eye of the bishop!

We crossed a football field leading up to the school where we sat in a large native style classroom for the feast. Our plate was packed with a chicken dish, fish curry, sweet pork with spring onions and vegetables as well as baked sweet potato, taro, rice and watermelon to finish. I sat next to a guy who had addressed us with a refreshing ‘Kia Ora mate’. He was the tourism officer and had spent some time in Rotorua doing a tourism management course. Robin sat next to the bishop who was a really down to earth guy who had also spent some time in New Zealand.After the ‘feasting’ we had to endure speeches from half a dozen members of the community, without fail each of them thanking us for being the first boat to join them on Saint James day. I made the mistake of telling someone that I lived near Kohimarama which was where they had a brother church in New Zealand. All of a sudden I found myself on the megaphone having to explain what the ‘village’ of Kohimarama was like. I said that there was also ocean near our village, and a volcano island offshore, but that there were more cars on the road and less people walking. I think they got the gist. We got back to the boat about 4pm, full to the brim of feast and Solomon’s culture.

A girl selling Betel nut in Lata

Robin with Dudley and Paul outside Dudleys carving house

A typical house

The not so easy to anchor port of Lata

Kids of Graciosa Bay

Local style tranpsort

Paul with the lunch spread

Migs and Chris.

Paul’s carving shed

Not a bad spot for Confederate

Most of the island covered like this

At the St James day celebrations

Em fella guys

Kids in dugout canoes

• Passing through two convergence zones – the ITCZ and the SPCZ meaning constant black clouds on the horizon, reefing sails, and then waiting for the 30-35 knot squalls to hit. Most of these passed within half an hour but the constant reefing of sails was tiring, and it meant we had to sail conservatively at night. We made only 100nm per day while on average in the trades Confederate prefers 120nm/day.
• 12 days of constant movement makes it oh so nice to be still again.
• We were tacking away from our galley the whole trip which made cooking near on impossible. In rougher weather we made do with potatoes for dinner just because it was easy.

Highs

• Crossing the equator for the second time with stars sprinkled above us. Pulling the bimini roof off the cockpit so we could spot shooting stars as we passed the invisible 0 degree longitude line and threw some wine to Neptune.
• About an hour after crossing the equator we were welcomed into the southern hemisphere by a large pod of dolphins illuminated under the moonlight. A magical feeling crept from the bow to the stern of confederate as the dolphins literally danced around the boat for about an hour. Incredible. Our only other visitors were the occasional bird trying to land on our mast.
• Moon rises which can only be described as a fire alight on the horizon and could compete with the best sunsets of the passage..
• 2 days of light winds north of the equator – even though we were motoring the sea was like a lake and the conditions extremely comfortable for an ocean passage.
• Fish! Our first Mahi Mahi since we left the Marshalls in Feb!
• Seeing one of the cone shaped duff islands, our first glimpse of land in 12 days. Always good to know that the GPS is doing it’s thing. And then a day later pulling into the Graciosa Bay and getting our first glimpse of life in the Solomons..
• Arriving in Lata to friendly people and surprisingly friendly officials. Ye ha we made it!