Merry Christmas from Yap!

The view from our hotel room...Savannah right in the middle.

Christmas came and went in a whirlwind!   Santa found us and brought Jake a bright, shiny, new bike (yes, this is his third bike and no, he can’t ride it yet…bikes and boats don’t mix but we’re going to try one more time).  He also brought just about every dinosaur Lego set possible.  We spent the entire morning putting together legos and our main salon has been taken over (I can’t seem to find the pictures of Christmas morning so I’ll have to post those later).

As for Andy and I….Jake and I bought Andy some new filet knives and lures and Andy got me a massage, manicure and pedicure at the local spa here.  As a gift to the whole family, we spent a night in one of the resort hotels, used their stand up showers, swam in the pool and watched cable tv!

Jake enjoying the iPad with free wifi in the hotel room.

Ice cream at our friend's house on Christmas Day.

I got up early Christmas morning and made homemade cinnamon rolls, chocolate milk (for Jake) and mimosas (for us).  After Jake opened all his presents and we had breakfast, our new friends here in Yap came and picked us up.  This is the couple that we brought back some stuff from Woleai (where they’re from), so to thank us, they had us over for a bar-b-que.  Their house is literally behind our boat and it’s a good representative of Yap; a strange mix of old, new, and somewhere in the middle.  They have a stove inside their house, but they prefer to use the old cooking house outside.  Vincent and Agatha (our new friends) wear western clothing while others in their family are more traditional (lava lavas sans shirt).  They have pigs and chickens, but the chicken we ate off the grill came from the grocery store.   It’s indicative of most of what we’ve seen in Yap.  Some people have spent much time away in Guam, the US, or some other country and have adapted their ways.  Others are holding tight to the old traditions.

Vincent and Agatha have a 10 year old son, Trevor.  He speaks perfect English and seems excited to have met Jake.  He and Jake played together well and we have future plans for Trevor to come out to the boat.

All in all, it was a great day.  We did have the chance to eat more turtle, but after a few bites, I decided to call it quits.  It’s one thing to try it, but another all together to get a taste for it.  Plus, the dogs pulled it off the grill and then Vincent rinsed it off and put it back on…I’m not sure how many times that happened before we got there.  When it was all picked over, he gave it to the pig.  The dogs snuck in again and took off down the road with it.  Quite the comedy.

We really like it here and have decided to look into getting Savannah hauled out.  We are in desperate need of bottom paint and we heard rumors it’s cheap to pull out here.  We would also like to take a look at some of those leaks we’ve been fixing along the way and see if there is any welding to be done.  There is a trolley that would be fairly easy to go up on, but we would have to go sideways…and then there’s the chore of trying to get the paint here.  I don’t know how feasible the whole thing is, but we’re going to look into it.  If it could save us a few thousand dollars, then I certainly think it’s worth it.

The weather is starting to ease up a bit, so it looks like we might get to go diving next week and not have our tails handed to us.  We haven’t done much in the way of tourism at this point, so lots to see and do in the next few weeks…