In the beginning

So here's how it all began...

What had started out as a relatively simple plan to spend a week driving, camping, and fishing our way down the Florida Keys, had somehow turned into a two week gig in the middle of the Pacific ocean. The island in question is Kiritimati, Republic of Kiribati.

A bit of background on Kiritimati. The island was discovered by Captain James Cook, December 24, 1777. They stayed until the following 2nd of January. Cook said: "As we kept our Christmas here, I called this discovery Christmas Island." It is part of the Line Islands and home to native Gilbertese. Kiritimati is the Gilbertese spelling of Christmas (in Gilbertese, the ti combination is pronounced s; thus kee-rees-mass). Christmas Island is the largest true pure coral Atoll in the world.

Most of its notoriety stems from its dark history as the venue for nuclear weapons testing by the British and United States spanning the 1957-59 UK operation Grapple X to the start of the U.S. testing with operation Dominic in 1962 and extending into more recent testing through the mid 70's, including the Polaris sub-launched weapons. It has sustained direct overhead and offshore blasts, including 3 of the top 5 highest-yielding detonations on our planet.

While it holds the most expansive shallow saltwater flats in the world, its depths plummet to thousands of feet just hundreds of yard off of its shores. The nearest surface or sub-surface structure to the Atoll is the Hawaiian island chain, some 1400 miles NE. It is due to this isolation that the island is also a magnet for Pelagic species of fish, and more specifically - Tunoids. Its remoteness also lends itself to hosting large numbers (6 million plus anually) of migratory sea birds; more than any place in the world.

And so it was decided shortly after the holidays - we were going to Christmas Island.