Penrhyn

Tetautua Village, on the windward side of Penrhyn.  Elias and Eric are standing so far from the local kids because we had just landed in the village for the first time, and immediately someone wanted to pose all the kids for a picture, before they had interacted at all.  Poor Elias, we throw him into some pretty trying situations: 'Here's a village full of kids who have known each other their whole lives and speak a language that you don't know.  Go have a play, we'll be leaving in a couple hours.'  He acquits himself pretty well.

Galactic at anchor in Penrhyn.

The first thing that people in Tetautua wanted to do was trade.  They were restrained about it, and we had to ask what they might be interested in trading for.  After we had been around for a few days, the scale of what they needed began to dawn on us.  They needed tools, and line for catching tuna, and small hooks for fishing the reef, and sunglasses, and t-shirts, and wetsuits, and baking powder, and flour, and rice, and petrol, and thongs/flip-flops, and cotter pins, and ibuprofen, and neosporin and lord knows what else.  As near as we could figure out, the last ship visit had been five months earlier.

We've been the beneficiaries of a lot of gifts in other places in Polynesia, so we figured this was our chance to just give people a few gifts without worrying about any quid pro quo of trading.  And there was clearly no point in taking any flour or petrol to the relative Land of Plenty that is American Samoa when those things were needed so badly on Penrhyn.

Of course, people reciprocated.

Matasa with a fan that she made for Alisa.  (If anyone from Tetautua reads this, I hope you'll forgive my spelling and other errors!)

 Seitu Marsters, the patriarch of one of the Tetautua families, took me lobstering with his nephew Boss Wallen and grandson Taatai Marsters.  We only got one lobster, and of course they insisted that I take it - the generosity of the people there was really astounding.  We were also given plenty of fish and chicken and coconuts and papaya during our stay.

Elias with a breakfast of lobster tail and coconut.  "We're living large," he said.

Taina and her husband Penui gave Eric this shell necklace.

So the exchange of goods was one part of the visit.  But what I really loved was the chance to just spend time with people.  Penrhyn is real deal Polynesia - the 160 people on the island speak a unique language (Mangarongaro), they live a semi-subsistence lifestyle, and the ten or so yachties that have visited Tetautua this year are the full extent of local tourism.

 The main street of Tetautua village.  Migration to New Zealand and Australia has shrunk the population dramatically, and there are as many empty houses as full.

A couple of thatch-roofed houses are still in use.

Tamu Tapaltau (and Eric).

Seitu is on the far right.

There were a couple times when it was just me with Penryhn Islanders - lobstering at night, or skiffing over the village of Omoka for the day so that I could check us out with Customs and Immigration before we left.  There was a lot of sitting around and listening to people talk Mangarongaro during those times.  The language has a querolous, argumentative sound to it.  I loved following the emotional flow of the conversations by just watching the play of expressions across everyone's face.

And when I tired of listening to a conversation that I couldn't follow, I looked out to the coconut palms blowing in the trades under the blue blue sky, and felt the slow river of time flowing over the atoll, this place where people are rich in time.

We went to church on Sunday (well, we went to one of the three services that day), which is a very yachtie thing to do.

 The singing was powerful - keening women, stentorian men, harmonies that were strident enough to sit just this side of beautiful, and intricate timing.  Good stuff.  Matasa lent Alisa the hat.

And we went to the celebration for the dedication of the refurbished school.  This was a big deal, with visiting dignitaries from Omoka giving speeches, letters from the government in Rarotonga being read, more beautiful singing, dancing by the kids, and a feast.

People gave us flowers to wear for the event and treated us as VIPs, insisting that we eat before them.

Alisa and Roriki Marsters at the ceremony.

I had been distracted by some headscratcher of a boat job that morning, and to my chagrin had forgotten to wear a collar to the event.  Dressing to the locals' standard for happenings like this is very much a part of my traveller's ethos!

Well, it's late here, and I'm not sure I'm summarizing our stay very well.  Suffice it to say that we were in Penrhyn for only a week, but that in that time we got to know some people living lives very different from ours.  Those people were remarkably welcoming to strangers, and we got glimpses of their lives as being as complicated and nuanced as those of any of our peers, albeit in a setting that appears deceptively simple to a visitor.  I hope we go back some day!

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Hmmm, I didn't even mention the sharks.

The lagoon is alive with sharks - Elias is feeding them some galley scraps here.

The end.

Leaving Penrhyn

That's what we're doing - the plan is to pull the hook tomorrow morning (by hand), catch the morning tide out of the pass, and start off on the 800 mile sail to Pago Pago, American Samoa.

Hopefully the passage will give me some time to process our stay here on Penrhyn. What a remarkable, remarkable place. Being here has been very much what I pictured long-distance sailing as before we set out: visiting a place that is too remote to reach except by private boat, being the only travellers on the scene, and interacting with the very friendly locals.

Penrhyn has internet, so people skype with their family members overseas, and almost everyone here has spent time in either New Zealand or Australia. So it's very much a place of the modern world. But the scale of remoteness about the place also sets it apart from everything else. Two ship visits a year are all the chance that Penrhyn Islanders have to supply themselves with the essentials of life. And right now the supply ship is overdue, so flour, rice and gasoline are all in very short supply. And those items will stay in short supply for another four or five weeks, when the ship is expected to arrive.

There is no scheduled air service here, and we were the fourth boat this year to sign the logbook for the village of Tetautua, where we spent most of our visit. So in a way we were real emissaries from the outside world. And we were emissaries from the outside world in a Polynesian culture where gift-giving and hospitality to strangers are reflexive.

So, quite an experience. But more about that later! The deck awning is down, the two dinghies are securely lashed on deck, the tradewinds are blowing hard, and the night is getting late. Time for me to sleep, since tomorrow we look forward, and set in motion another leg of this voyage...

Ten

September 22nd was our tenth anniversary.

We celebrated at anchor in the atoll of Penrhyn, on the calm windward side, by the little village of Tetautua.

Elias had ended the day horribly. After coming back to the boat he discovered that he had lost a necklace that local eminence Seitu had given him. This sent him into a two-hour tantrum. First there were real tears at the loss, then forced tears, and then an escalation into screaming and moaning worthy of a mortally-wounded animal in the bush. Adult tempers were severely tested by it all, and we didn't necessarily pass the test with perfect marks...

When he had finally fallen asleep Alisa and I regained our equanimity in the cockpit over a dinner of chicken and fish that had also been given to us by Seitu. Our fridge has been down since Tahaa, so this gift of animal protein made our celebratory meal into a real routine-breaking treat. Alisa rounded out the meal with a bottle of Côtes du Rhône that she had bought in Tahiti. The surf boomed on the outside of the reef and the village generator clattered away in a nattering, conversational tone. A fringe of stars hung low around the cockpit awning.

So Alisa, I said.

Yes?

You know that hypothetical dog musher who would have married you if I hadn't come along?

I think I remember you saying something about that.

You know how I also say that I saved you from a lifetime of shovelling dog sh*t from a dog yard in some village in Alaska?

I think I remember you mentioning that too.

Well. What do you think - would you rather be shovelling dog sh*t or doing this?

I could see her smiling in the half-light.

Does it matter that my answer would have been different a couple hours ago?

Our 20th Anniversary

Well. There are bound to be days like that.

With the anchor windlass refusing all offers of resurrection yesterday morning, Alisa and I set to the business of hauling the anchor by hand.

The route to our success was not obvious. We were anchored in 50 feet of water, with 250 feet of chain out. The tradewinds were having their way with the seven miles of open lagoon upwind of us, so that Galactic was rearing back against the chain in a steep chop. And the windlass doesn't have a manual backup.

We rigged up a system by tying our spare chain hook to the old main halyard and leading it from the bow back to the primary winch in the cockpit. And then I got into the business of cranking the winch, and cranking and cranking, to pull all 20 tons of Galactic up to the anchor. Alisa spun the windlass gypsy by hand to send the chain down the hawse hole. And every twenty feet or so, when the chain hook on the halyard had made it back to the windlass, which sits next to the mast on this boat, Alisa took the load on the chain with another line and moved the line I was grinding back to the bow, ready for another 20 feet to be brought in.

It was going reasonably well until we managed to haul the chain bar-tight under a coral obstruction. We weren't paying attention and didn't realize what we were doing until the chain was so tight that it was pulling the bow down into the water. So now we had a chain under a couple thousand pounds of load that had to somehow be cast off so that we could get some slack to try to drive off the coral.

That took a little thinking. A little somewhat panicky thinking, since the bow roller was in the process of disintegrating under the load.

Meanwhile, were the two boys going to pieces below decks?

They were.

Eventually we got the load off the chain and managed to put fifty hard-won feet back into the water. And, in a development that we were not expecting, given our past experiences with being fouled on coral that we couldn't see, we managed to drive off the obstruction in one try.

Finally, after three hours of work, the anchor broke the surface, and came to rest on the mangled bow roller. We motored across the lagoon to the village of Tautua, on the windward side of the atoll, the fabled Finest Anchorage in All the Cook Islands.

The boys mollified below, Alisa came up to the cockpit to enjoy a few minutes of the trip with me. We talked about our wedding anniversary, which we'll celebrate in a few days.

So that's cool, I said. Our tenth anniversary in Penrhyn.

I know, said Alisa. For a while I thought we'd have our twentieth here, too.

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N.O.D.Y.

That's the acronym that I've come up with to describe what we're looking for in tropical anchorages at this point - N.O.D.Y., pronounced "noddy", as in the seabird.

It stands for No Other Damn Yachts.

I don't want to come off as any kind of misanthrope, which I'm surely not. And I hasten to add that some of my very best friends are other yachties, and we've gotten to know some really remarkable people who are out sailing the world.

But in the Society Islands, which we just left, there are so many yachts that all the anchorages begin to look like RV campgrounds ("caravan parks", I think, for the Antipodeans). After a month there, sailing felt like RVing for people with lots of money who don't mind being seasick.

So in Penrhyn we were looking for N.O.D.Y. And that's what we've found - we're the eighth yacht to visit this year, and the last one was here two weeks ago.

So that's all good. It's really an incredibly isolated place - we're anchored off Omoka, the larger of the two villages, a cluster of houses built a meter above sea level and a hundred and ninety miles from the nearest neighboring island.

The Customs, Health and Quarantine officers who came on board this morning told us that the island gets only two visits by a supply ship each year. Right now petrol is perilously scarce, and it will remain so until the next resupply.

Our plan was to clear in with the officials and then head over to the smaller village on the windward side of the atoll. Omoka is on the leeward side, which means that seven miles of open water lies upwind of us, which makes for quite a choppy anchorage when the trades are booming.

First we fought to get our 250 feet of chain up as an approaching squall had the bow forever swinging away from where we wanted to go. But when we almost had the anchor up the squall line was nearly on top of us, which meant it was no time to be picking a route through the coral bommies of the atoll lagoon. So we left the anchor where it was, and once again put out 250 of chain.

And then, when the squall was gone and the winds were calm, the windlass refused to retrieve the anchor. This is the fourth time that the windlass motor has failed to heed the call of duty. And this time I think it's for good. And this is where I should mention that we don't really have a manual backup on the windlass. So tomorrow we'll get to figure out how to retrieve the 250 feet of chain and the 88 pound anchor against the tradewinds, which are again booming. Should call for a bit of seamanship!

Meanwhile, I was all for a visit ashore to Omoka this afternoon, until Alisa reminded me that the Health officer had told us that all the kids in the village have the flu. And we don't particularly fancy the 810 mile passage to Pago Pago with two sick kids. So here we sit, off one of the most isolated villages that we'll ever visit, in self-imposed quarantine, all too securely anchored to the bottom.

Clearly, we're living the dream.