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Date: 31 May 2008 19:26:45
Title: Suwarrow, Cook Islands
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13:15.090S  163:06.433W
 
Sadly, we'll be leaving this place tomorrow, Saturday 5/31.  Suwarrow has a history of luring unsuspecting adventurous people to stay on for a while.  Its most famous inhabitant, Tom Neale, was a New Zealander who happened to sail to Suwarrow back in the 1950's and stayed on and off for a total of over six years.  By himself.  He wrote a book about his experience appropriately named, 'An Island to Oneself'.   Suwarrow is a Cook Island national reserve park and is completely uninhabited six months of the year.  The other six months (the non-cyclone season) a caretaker lives here on one of the small motus, Anchorage Island, in a raised hut with no refrigeration, very little electricity - basically no amenities.  John, his wife Veronica and their four sons arrived here just a few weeks ago, and will be staying for the next six months to look after the island.  This is their fourth season here.  There will be no weekly supply ships, no monthly supply ships, basically no supply ships at all, and their only contact with the outside world will be their SSB radio and the 'yachties' that sail here.  John says they get about 100 yachts per season.  Each one is allowed to stay for as much as two weeks and there are no customs/immigration check-in requirements.  It's almost like a stop in the twilight zone.  There will be no trace of our stay in the Cook Islands in our passports or on our paperwork. 
 
So you may ask, what does one do when anchored off a mostly deserted island?  Well, you tour one of the nearby motus where a mass of birds nest, sign the giant visitors register kept by John and Veronica, read the list of rules (all of which can be broken as long as John knows about it ahead of time), snorkel, eat pasta on the beach cooked by the Italian rally boat OneLife, invite the Brits over for dinner as long as they bring their own beer, wine, plates, silverware, vegetables and meat, bake enough cookies to feed 50 people, fix the autopilot, fix the watermaker, throw your back out, recover, change the oil in the generator, eat more pasta on the beach provided by the Italians, snorkel with the sharks, clean out the locker with the piles of pasta in bags purchased in Panama and Ecuador that have a large number of black, crawly bugs in them.  Those are the things you do, but not necessarily in that particular order.
 
Yes, the watermaker and autopilot are fixed.  Is this really a surprise to anyone?  After pulling all the pieces completely apart, Don discovered there wasn't really anything wrong with our water maker.  Then, after reading more on the topic, we decided that perhaps we weren't letting the water maker run for long enough periods of time.  We've changed our tactics accordingly and the salt content in the water seems to have decreased back to what is considered good.  Once that was determined, Don moved on to the autopilot, but not until after he twisted the wrong way and did his back in.  A common enough occurrence in the past, but one that has happened only a few times on the boat.  Never fear, boat maintenance was not interrupted for mere excruciating back pain.  Oh no.  The autopilot was fixed (faulty connector), and then Don moved on to help Peter on Asolare attempt to fix his water maker.  Several days later, all was well with our water maker and autopilot and mostly well with Don's back.
 
Moving on now to snorkeling.  Which is quite marvelous here if you don't mind sharing the water with not only the pesky white and black tipped reef sharks, but the more feared 'grays' as well.  The first place we snorkeled was a spot pointed out to us by John as he led us on an island tour in his aluminum boat followed by a convoy of us rally boaters in dinghies (nine dinghies overfilled with boaters wearing funny hats - the parade looked a bit ridiculous - I was sorry we didn't bring the camera).  This particular snorkeling spot was a true coral head - reaching up from the bottom 50 or 60 feet below, we circled around the coral tower and marveled at the wide variety of coral types - all kinds of shapes and sizes piled up and when taken together form all kinds of caves and crevices along the sides.  Our favorite coral/fish sighting was a growth of coral that looked like a hand with fingers sticking up.  If you watched it long enough, a school of tiny translucent fish would emanate from it, looking like bubbles escaping from the coral fingers.  So cool.
 
The next spot we snorkeled was fantastic in a whole different way.  This spot was in the pass through the coral reef that surrounds the atoll.  We found that if we went when the tide was coming in we wouldn't get swept out to sea (always a good thing) and the water would be high enough that we could float over the top of the really shallow coral that lines the pass.  We anchored the dinghy and hopped in the deep water.  After a bit we saw two eagle sting rays swimming through the water near the bottom.  These are very distinctive as they are black with spots just like a leopard.  Some say they are gorgeous, I say they are scary and hid behind Don as they skated away from us.  As we approached the shallow coral from the deeper channel, Don and I saw a shark and if I had realized at the time that it was a gray and not a reef shark, I would have been more alarmed.  As it was I did the usual thing and hid behind Don until it vanished into deeper water.  The shark was not that big, maybe 3 or 4 feet, but the gray sharks are known to take slightly more interest in humans than the reef sharks do - meaning they might circle and get close enough to realize we aren't fish and then lose interest.  None of the sharks around here are considered aggressive or extremely dangerous - they are too well fed by the reef fish for that.  But still - a shark is a shark and gray ones are scarier than reef ones.  Anyway, once we got into the shallow coral pools, the sights were really cool.  More colorful fish all in one place than we'd seen in a while.  We saw what we think were parrot fish - patches of red, orange and yellow with a mouth that looks like a beak.  Bigger fish that were sapphire blue with emerald green mixed in.  Fish that were one or two inches wide and a foot or two long with a mouth shaped like a bugle.  Giant clams embedded in the coral.  Reef sharks that didn't pay any attention to us.
 
The third and last place we snorkeled was a reef in the middle of the pass (one that we tried to avoid when we made our instrument landing into the lagoon).  Here again the coral came straight up from the bottom maybe a hundred feet below and formed a giant wall reaching nearly to the surface.  We anchored the dinghy and hopped in the water.  Almost immediately we saw another gray shark.  There were three of us in the water, and this shark must have found us interesting as he came closer than others have and circled us part way with his beady eye staring at us.  It is difficult to judge distances in the water - he wasn't two feet away, but probably wasn't 20 feet away either.  Somewhere in between.  Don and Mandy swam on while I continued to look behind us every chance I got.  He was still back there, but eventually did lose interest.  After struggling to use those eyes in the back of my head (something my mother never seemed to have trouble with) I think some type of rearview mirror for snorkelers would be a very good product idea - maybe a project for all of you enterprising designers and engineers out there.
 
The rest of our time here was spent eating excellent pasta on the beach prepared by the crew of OneLife.  We're not sure how they managed to cook perfect pasta for fifty people using a two burner stove and a giant pot, but we figured it was best not to ask too many questions and just say thank you.  The rest of the boaters brought their own specialty dishes including rice salad (commonly known as rice with stuff in it) and a 'pudding' (commonly known as dessert).  All good.  We were entertained by the caretaker John, who played guitar and sang for us, as did Gerry from Northern Sky and Young Will even played a 'proper tune' on the guitar for us.  All that was missing was a camp fire, marshmallows and a few verses of '99 bottles of beer on the wall'.
 
We had a repeat performance of the British bring your own everything dinner party and that was quite lovely too.  Not only did the crews of Cleone and Lady Kay bring their own food, drink and eating utensils, but Rob from Lady Kay did all the grilling and Young Will from Cleone did all the 'washing up'.  This could be a new trend in dinner parties.  Invite your friends, tell them to bring everything and do everything.  Then you do nothing.  Perfect.
 
So, aside from throwing out six bags of pasta and one bag of rice that had creepy crawly black bugs in them, spending half a day in the massive heat cleaning out the giant locker they were in, and aside from Don having back trouble, we've had a great time here and will be sad to leave.  But leave we will.  Tomorrow is the plan, but if there is no wind, there is a chance we will wait until Sunday to leave.  Our next stop is the island country of Nuie, about 540 miles to the southwest.  It should be an easy four day trip, but we'll see how it goes.  Nuie is not a coral atoll or a volcanic 'high' island.  It's a giant slab of rock that was pushed up as a result of volcanic action, but it's not a volcano itself.  It is shaped like a table - flat, but raised and has no natural harbors.  We will be going to the western side of the island where there is a small yacht club that maintains twenty moorings in the wide open bay.  The plan is to stay there no longer than 72 hours (to make room for other boats that will need the moorings - it is very difficult to anchor there) and then move on to Tonga, which is another 230 miles away (an easy day and a half).  If the swell and/or wind is too strong from the west, we will not be able to stay in Nuie (since the mooring area is not really protected from the open sea) and will go directly to Tonga.  We are hoping the conditions are good enough to stay.  The dinghy landing alone should be part of the adventure of Nuie.  Because the dinghy landing is open to the sea, the swell is bad enough that as soon as you hop out of the dinghy onto the crumbling concrete wharf, you hook the dinghy to a crane and pull it out of the water and set it on the wharf.  We're told that to be successful, this operation should be done all at once (land, hop out, lift the dinghy up).  Hmmmm...we'll see how that goes in our 'going out to dinner' clothes.
 
Pictures of Suwarrow to follow when we get to Nuie (assuming we stay there and assuming there is good internet access).
 
Anne
 
 
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