Moored
Apataki Carenage
Wind: East, F3 Gentle breeze
Weather: Mostly sunny,
warm
Today I turned my
attention to a spot of upper deck maintenance, attending to a couple of small
rust spots on the foredeck. Maintaining a boat of any size is simply a matter of
starting at one end and when you get to the other it is time to start back at
the beginning again. Also I tried to fix a leak in the salt water pump (very
useful for rinsing dishes, saves a lot of fresh water at sea). One of the
diaphragms had a hole in it so some time ago I made a new one from a bit of
rubber from the inner tube of an old truck tyre. I seem to have gone backwards
with this but have ended up almost encasing the thing in caulking compound.
Tomorrow I will reinstall and see if it works. I would buy a new one but there
aren't any chandlers ready to hand.
In
the afternoon I went for a walk to the windward and ocean side of the
motu. Broken coral makes up most of the shore line, the vegetation thins
out quickly as the windward side is approached, only smaller hardy shrubs hold
there own here. Looking out to the deep dark blue sea and the waves
endlessly pounding on the edge of the reef I pondered the sudden and
dramatic drop into the ocean deep only 100 meters away and the eons of
geological and biological activity that has gone on to make this
atoll. It is impossible to really grasp the time that all this has
taken and just what a small dot I am. But, dot that I am, it would
seem that my kind has the collective ability to submege this atoll in a very
short period and cause the biological activity that has helped make it and
currentluy continues to do so, come to a halt.
"What
a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in
form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in
apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor
woman neither ..." (Hamlet)
Yesterday while
chatting to Alfred, being interested in how he had come to establish the
carenage, I asked him whether he owned the land and how long for, my mind
thinking of loans and repayments, business plans and profit and loss
accounts. He answered that it had been in his family for a long time,
along with land on several of the other atolls. His ancestors came to the
Tuamotus in 1640, at least this is what I understood him to say, and his great,
great, … grandfather was a warrior, came to Apataki, “kill men, eat men, kill
children, make babies with women. Old women … ” and here he made a dismissive
gesture with wave of his hand, so goodness knows what happened to them. I
guess this makes Alfred the traditional owner and mortgages rather
irrelevant.
All is
well.
