The week leading up to Easter is the annual Papua New Guinea National Game Fishing Titles.  This year the Titles are being held in beautiful Rabaul.  As some of you may have read earlier, our last trip to Kokopo and Rabaul ended on a bit of a low note, so flying to the Titles with Xavier is a bit of redemption for us.  Yes, that’s right – Xavier and myself fishing the Titles in East New Britain!  How many people have this opportunity?

We are fishing with our good friends Simon and Amanda on their boat that was shipped from Port Moresby free of charge by one of the sponsors Consort.  Big ups to Consort and the rest of the sponsors.

This morning, full of excitement I woke at 3am, and after lying their for a while just got up for the day.  One of my boys was scheduled to pick us up at 8:15am which is quite early for our 11am flight, but karma must have been happening as the checkin system at Domestic was down, and it was a very slow process getting everyone on planes manually.  A bit of light handed banter with some of the checkin girls and we had a counter more or less opened for us and skipped the queues.  Amazing what a smile, a no worries, and a helpful attitude does – they really went out of their way to make sure Xavier and myself got on the plane, but some nice seats too, and special fragile stickers for my fishing rods.  I just happened to ask if I could take them as carry on, but I got told that I couldn’t take them on as the could be used as a weapon, only to fish maybe :). So the smiles only got me so far…

Plane was delayed leaving, as the automated manifest system was down.  There is nothing like sitting for 45 min in a metal box on the Sunny side, when it’s 35deg cel outside and we are all starting to sweat… Yummy!

The flight to Kokopo has ended up being uneventful, but I took this photo on the coastline after going over the Owen Stanley Range

  
  
And of course to get me in the PNG mood, I’m listening to Sheppard.  Sheppard is a band loosely out of Australia, but has its roots here in PNG – fantastic sound and if you haven’t heard of them you need to go buy a CD.

We are staying at the famous Rabaul Hotel, after an aborted booking at the Travelodge.  The Travelodge didn’t turn out to be suitable for us, and Amanda got us into The Rabaul Hotel with the manager Susie really bailing us out of the shit.  Although, we could always bunk down at work 🙂

Really looking forward to the trip and the fishing, hopefully I bore you all silly with tall tales of the ones that got away and awesome pictures of the ones that didn’t 🙂

Aaron