It’s 0455 in the morning. I just finished the mixing of the bread dough with sourdough. Now it’s resting and I can write.

We are sailing with an averaged SOG of almost 6 KN with MaRe wearing her pajamas. The wind was for a while coming from almost SSE or 145 – 152 deg. This blew us to W and the XTE was almost 8 NM. (XTE is the cross track error which shows the distance to the planned route.) Then the wind turned more to E, and the XTE shrank to current 6.7 NM. However it became more bumpy because we are also sailing a bit against the waves.

The wind stays stable at around 15 KN.

While kneading the dough, my thoughts went back to American Samoa. It’s s place I like and I don’t like.

What I like very much are the very friendly people and, as a sailor the simple and straight forward in- and outbounce clearing procedure.

One sails into the harbor, calls on VHF CH 16 the harbor master and gets guidance on where to go and what to do. There is no need for an Advanced Notification of Arrival requiring internet to download the document fill it in and send it to email address (which in one case didn’t even work), waiting for a confirmation that I can sail into a harbor, but which doesn’t come. One way communication of “advanced” countries.

Public transportation is very simple and pretty efficient. Small buses are running on fixed routes with bus stops every few hundreds meters. To me it appears not to be a real public transportation system but a license business. The ones who get a license can buy a bus and run a along the routes. The busses are interesting constructions. The chassis frame, front part, engine and gear are from small sized bus, mainly Toyota. However, the rest is a wooden construction with few supporting metal pipes. Thus, the passenger compartment is about 1 m wider than that of a normal bus. The wider version allows to have 2-persons seats on each side. Most often such a seat is occupied by only one person with no space even for my half bum. There is another very special design feature, which can technically be called an audio system. It features a bulky bass speaker system under the last row of the seats. The other speakers are in the front part. Except for one bus we used, what comes out of these audio system is just high volume noise with huge bass bum bum.

Surprisingly few people smoke in the streets. It seems the local government is interested to keep smoking and vaping as little as possible. A pack of cigarettes, I heard, costs 11 USD.

What I didn’t like much was the USA influence which is to be seen immediately.

Big cars dominate the street. SUV or a pickup truck with huge engines. One I saw had even a V8 engine, more of them are high likely. Then I expect V6 engines. This all to just move the personal 2 t of steel around.

There is not really a center of a town or village. All types of buildings are mixed up. I could not identify centers of life.

“Restaurants” which we saw are all fast food shops, creating a huge amount of garbage. Where does all this garbage go on an island? I expect that there are also hidden restaurants for the people with more money. The majority of the people eats fast food junk.

The food quality also is to be seen in the obvious obesity people suffer from. I recall having seen maybe a handful of people with a normal body and guess that this is less than a percent. The sad result of USA food and drinks.

I love the very friendly people but…

Back to my dough, it’s already formed and just waits for Shigeo’s cookies to be finished baking and then my two breads go into the oven. Freshly baked bread for breakfast at 1030. Pretty late due is today.