X-mas Island – Kirimati
May 16th, 2009 at 11:27 PM by Hugh
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. .
11 hours, 20 minutes later
I’m digging the scarf… oh yeah nice fish!
13 hours, 24 minutes later
Wow, that place sounds very interesting. Did you eat only fish while you were there? If not, what else did you eat? Did you have to prepare it yourself?
Awesome looking boat too.
14 hours, 5 minutes later
You can “google” Kirimati and find out more. We had fish every nite, but they had meat from Australia, frozen veggies, instant mashed potatoes, bacon, pancakes and stuff. Ate real well. They had a kitchen staff of two ladies who did all the cooking. Two of the guys were in a smaller version of that boat and capsized with the guide. Lost most of their fishing stuff, a digital camera and got lots of bruises (the boat flipped and landed on them).