Raving Amicks

I just finished my chair “The Chalk Back” for the Mount baker Plywood Project last night. We had a create today consisting of several 4-7 year olds trying out our furniture. The problem for this project was to make some sort of educational furniture for the younger age bracket.

Hey everyone, my phone was stolen about a week ago, I need to call Sprint and I should have another soon. Happy Mother’s day mom, sorry I didn’t call…but I love you of course. In the meantime, who can guess what movie this is from ( Dad you should know this one, we watched it together once in the living room! ) — “Do you have any Tobacco?” Ok.

Spent 1 week plus a few days fishing for bonefish with 4 of my friends. This is my 5th time to X-mas Island and maybe the best. We stayed at a new place (Ikari House) with air conditioning and separate toilets and showers and great food! Definitely an upgrade from our other visits. Anyway, for years there has been one flight in a week from Hawaii via jet. There are about 8 simple fishing lodges on the island with a fishing capacity of maybe 90 fisherman at any one time. Well, it seems the Kirimati government and Air Pacific had this disagreement on subsidies paid to Air Pacific (tremendous “trickle down” economic value from visiting fisherman). Anyway, a small charter outfit took over the route (once a week) with an 18 person capacity turbo-prop. On our flight in there were only we five fisherman, so we had all the great fishing spots to ourselves for a week! To give you an idea of the isolation, X-mas Island was only inhabited during WWII with permanent residents starting then. Our head guide “English”‘s grandfather was the first person to live permanently on X-mas Island. Give this a hard thought – “English” is married, has 3 children AND HAS NEVER BEEN OFF THIS ISLAND! Not even to the nearby island of Tarawa! Anyway, we fished nearly dawn to dusk everyday, got treated well and had a great time. Here are some pictures. X-mas Island is not for the faint-hearted, no bars, no restaurants, not much of anything except “stayin’ alive!” (for  all the locals) and fishin’ for us visitors. .