We arrived well after dark on Wed April 20 and spent the first night anchored in the harbor near a big cargo ship. In the morning after several radio calls to Port Control, we were given permission to proceed to the marina, where there were two other boats and plenty of hands to catch dock lines.
All of the officials came to the boat to process us except immigration. We had a slight hiccup with Customs, though. Upon reviewing our outbound clearance from The Marshalls and after making a phone call back to the office, the customs official informed us that we would need to go to the office for an interview, because Tarawa, Kiribati was listed as the next port on our paperwork. We had no idea how big or small an issue this could be, but figured it must happen all the time to cruisers when plans change en route. So, we left the boys on board, and Tim and I walked down to the office. The interview was painless, but Tim was a little too chatty for my taste. In situations like this you need to just answer the questions that are asked and not offer any extraneous information, because you never know what could come back to bite you in a foreign country. Tim tends to believe that if you are just nice to people nothing can go wrong. Anyway, they let us stay without any fine or penalty.
Next was a taxi ride downtown to the immigration office. We had a short wait and our taxi driver waited for us and then gave us a tour of the town making sure to point out the popular shopping spots. He also took us to the telecom store to get hooked up with 3G internet access. We relaxed briefly at The Edge Cafe having snacks and drinks before becoming completely consumed for the next two days with monitoring and preparing for Tropical Cyclone Amos. My last post was all about that drama, and you can catch up with it here: Link.
Gresham Family Exodus 