29 times around the sun

And another year wiser for sure! It's been an exciting, inspiring and fun-filled 28th year. September 24th 2009 was a good day. Good company, good food, warm lagoon, surfing behind the dingy, cold beer, poker and a homemade banana birthday cake!

Flanked on both sides by "The Norwegians of To Fluer", and despite the intense heat, Mr. Abel miraculously continues to steadily and stealthily annihilate all 8 of his poker opponents to eventually take the pot.

Tonga: Days like these...

There's something special about sailing up to a distant tropical island on a yacht with only 2 other people. Not really knowing how it's going to be, just going off 4 day old swell and weather reports, trying to get a closer look through the binocs as you stabilize yourself from the rolling swells and sip the morning coffee. And then you finally get close enough to see that you and the crew are going to get barreled off your nut for the next several hours and weird chemicals start running through your veins, you literally start jumping up and down and froth forms around the mouth, it soon gets hard to form complete sentences and you resort to primative hoots, hollars and screams of excitement as you get your gear together as soon as humanly possible, we're lucky we remembered to drop the anchor. It's days like these you remember for the rest of your life.