Salamumu was the other sliver of paradise we found on the southern coast of Samoa. It was a deserted white sand beach with inky black lava rock formations lining the shore. We were there during low tide, so the lava rocks formed beach coves perfect for swimming, napping, and sunbathing.

The Teuila Festival began on our last night in Samoa. The festival is a celebration of Samoan cultural dance that coincided with the 2015 Commonwealth Youth Games also being held in Samoa this week. The highlight of the evening was the fire knife competition. We watched the preliminary rounds, so we saw former champions and novice dancers alike (and saw a surprising number of flaming fire knives slip from their hands and fly across the stage). All of the dancers performed to the same throbbing drum beat, and entered the stage with only one end of their fire knife lit (knife is a bit of a misnomer though, they were more batons than anything). Their first task was to light the second end: some dancers were able to hold the flame in their mouth, others set the floor of the stage on fire, and as a last resort, some dancers went ahead and lit their lavalava on fire.

After spending the day at the beach, we needed a fresh water rinse to wash the salt off before our drive home. We stopped at Togitogiga Falls, a series of smaller cascades that fall into an idyllic jungle swimming pool.

We spent Sunday at Lalomanu Beach, the best stretch of sand we’ve found thus far in the South Pacific. Unlike any of the islands we visited in French Polynesia, the reef here abuts the shore directly, creating an easily swimmable lagoon and languorous expanses of peach-perfect sand.

We spent the last three days in a rental car touring the island, and Samoa proves to be a place of superlatives: the most luscious waterfalls, the most glorious beaches, the most magnificent flora, the most secretive swimming holes, the best landscaped roads, the cleanest, most colorful villages, the most scrumptious restaurants, and the fewest tourists of any island we have visited. While exploring, we ran into one other yachtie, a few Kiwis staying at the smattering of modest bungalows around the island, and two backpackers paying about $20 per night to stay in open-air fales on the beach (fales are the ubiquitous form of Samoan abode: a raised paved or wooden platform with pillars supporting a domed roof).

We’ve been in Apia, Samoa for 32 hours and have already had adventures and delights aplenty.After sailing 1,244 miles in nine days, we pulled into the marina at 10 am on Monday morning, breathing huge sighs of exhausted relief. We hailed the harbor master on the VHF, and he instructed us to stay on the boat until officials from the health department, quarantine, customs, and immigration control paid us a visit.

Well team, we’re still out here, rockin’ and rollin’ through the watery expanses of the western South Pacific.We’ve had some excellent conditions for high speed sailing the last few days. Long afternoons and nights with steady winds over twenty knots, keeping our sails full and our hull charging above six and half knots through the waves. And yes, we consider six and half or seven knots (aka miles per hour) to be high speed sailing, indeed.

There is a moment in Odysseus' journey when he is so close to home, he can see campfires burning on the hillsides of Ithaca. But then a mutinous crew member, suspicious of being robbed of his fare share of treasure, opens the ox-hide bag containing the gift of King Aelous—winds from all points of the compass. Once the silver strings were opened the winds were released, and Odysseus and his men were blown, yet again, off course.