Kate and took our canoe out for its inaugural voyage. We bought it a couple of months ago when we did our trip down the East coast to the southern end of New Ireland.
We had to take it apart to get it home, and we didn’t get around to putting it back together until today. We did paint it with leftover paint, but now that it is done I realize it looks like a German Uboat. Dark Gray, with black trim. I will not name it "U232" or anything, I promise.
The canoe leaks quite a bit. Kate called it “sweating” it just comes right through the wood, like sweat. So we need to bring a bailer with us on our next trip. I have seen othercanoe paddlers, doing a lot bailing. I watched 2 kids in leaky canoe, the one in the front with a coconut shell was bailing furiously while the kid in the back was paddling, but they couldn’t get to the shore in time…
We paddled over to Nusa Resort to have drinks and dinner. The boat has a bad habit of turning to the left toward the outrigger. Even when I paddle on the left hand side it turns left, but I’ve noticed this in other canoes, so it might be operator error, not an assembly problem.
We are just back after one month in the USA. We didn’t get a real vacation there because we were both working a lot, but I tried to get my quota of rich food in. Bad news is I have high cholesterol, got to lay off that New Zealand butter.
Our Bodies of water project was a big success. We had a lot of fun, saw a ton of friends, saw some real freaks. The fact that some people thought we were freaks was a bonus.
I paddled out from the dock to Edamago island. It was a beautiful still afternoon, and slightly raining, which is actually ideal paddling weather here since its not too hot.
When I got there I was picking up junk on the beach and I found one of the messages in a bottle I released 4 months ago. It floated around out there for a while then ended-up back on the same island that I went to that day. See 1/26/2010.I wonder how long it sat on the beach, and how long it circulated in the water….
I had a nice paddle and re-released it along with a new bottle. Truth: Sometimes rare things do happen.
Earlier that week I went to check-out some WWII artifacts. This pillbox and two giant guns are on Nusa Island. Right near the blow-hole spot where I have been paddling and diving.
The guns are in pretty good shape, and I can now say for sure the giant metal object in the yard at the new beach house is the bottom part of a shore gun. I wonder what happened to the rest of it…
There are giant springs scattered all around the place that must have been part of the shock absorber mechanismKind of amazing that this stuff is just sitting around in the jungle here..
I did a short paddle for a few hours in the evening. I was going to check out this lumber ship, but it pulled-up the anchor and took off right as I got close. It’s funny that its from Hong Kong, we will be going there in a couple of weeks, I’ll look for this logging ship.
It was another very calm and beautiful night. The sunsets are always great, even if you don’t actually see the sun drop below the clouds, like you do in the USA. The pictures don’t do it justice, the colors are all over the place…
5/16/2010 Diving…
We went out to AlbatrossPass for diving with Scuba Ventures on 5/16/2010. The best time to dive the pass is on an incoming current, into the pass.
The dive is very nice wall with a lot of pelagic and reef fish on it. We went back and forth along the wall, then anchored ourselves at 20 some odd fish with a hook and just hung out in the current.
This was a very nice dive, I really enjoyed the end part just waiting in the current. It seemed almost as if I was at the aquarium watching hundreds of fish swim back and forth. My favorite were the sharks and mackerel who moved so quickly back and forth out in the deep water. This would be a good place for spearfishing…
The current was running pretty strongly up into the pass to the North around 10:00AM in the morning. The extreme low tide for the day was around noon, so at 10:00AM it was a falling tide near the bottom of the range. There didn’t seem to much current at all when we went back through around 13:00.
Release Date 5/18/2010
I went out for a short paddle to Nusa to talk to some outfitters who were running a multi-day kayaking trip. They said I could go along with them, but they later changed their mind, so in the end I didn’t go.
It was kind of a half-assed trip anyway. Paddling with a bunch of inexperienced people with a client in the front of each double and a Papua New Guinean guide in the back. They were headed up toward New Hanover, which is the same direction I hope to go on a trip soon. I’m just going to have to do it on my own I guess.
It was a very clear night, and I could see New Hanover off in the distance, see the pictures…
Pictures:
Rain storm heading toward me.
crocodile infested lunch spot
house and boat the sign says "petrol for sale"
storm on the way out
group of kids in a canoe that I saw as I was leaving.
I went for a longish paddle down to AlbatrossPass. Kavieng is near the very north of New Ireland, but to get all the way around to the other side of the island, which is called “The West Coast” you have to go another 8 or 9 nautical miles through a small pass called “AlbatrossPass”.
I have been down in this direction before, but this time I made it to the gap between the islands, that is a lot like a river. It totally reminded of the mangrove swamps in Florida.
I kept looking out of the corner of my eye for crocadiles and the spot I stopped for lunch was just some rocks in the mangroves and wasn’t real comfortable.
I didn’t get all the way to the West coast because I was running out of time:
13:15 left kavieng
15:15 entrance to cut between islands.
15:56 house where they were selling fuel. This was only sign of human life in the area.
16:20 turned around, and had lunch.
16:40 start paddling back
17:50 in the rain off Eissen Island.
19:15 home.
The area was interesting, but I wish I had left earlier so I could have gotten all the way to the other coast. I hope to go diving on the other coast next weekend. It is supposed be really nice. Steep wall dives and massive numbers of fish.
It had been very rainy for the past 3 or 4 days, and I got pelted by rain a couple of times, but the winds weren’t too bad, and it wasn’t really cold. It was actually much better than paddling in full sun.
I took a photo of the being in the rain on the way out, and the advancing rain just as it was getting dark. The advancing storm eventually hit me, but both storms only lasted 20 minutes or so.
Kate left the same morning to go to Tench Island. This is a tiny spot about 70 Nautical Miles North of Kavieng. The week before the Island was hit by the Beluga Revolution, a German cargo ship. It did a lot of damage to the reef so the local government asked Kate’s organization to do a survey of the damage.
I got a satellite call from her that night, and they did make it up there. They were going in little tiny “banana boats” Kate made sure they took 2 boats just in case there were problems. You hear stories about people breaking down and being lost for months at a time. The locals don’t have Sat phones, GPS untils, or EPIRBs.
I went out for an afterwork paddle. It was a very calm day so I could easily see deep into the water. Even in the Harbor there were huge rocks covered with coral. I went out toward where our new house is, and then paddled along the coast. I picked up a lot of floating trash. Some of it must have been at sea for a long time. It was covered with barnacles and all the writing on the bottles was in Japanese or Chinese. Many of the floating things had become little islands of life with a crab or two living on it, along with the barnacles and other things. These crabs would be quickly eaten if they were swimming free, but on the trash they have their own little protected ecosystem.
See the picture of the floating nut. There is a crab living on top, and bunch of barnacles, and a school of little fish that live underneath it. All these animals were using it for protection. Kate told me these nuts are used by the local people to do poison fishing. They crush them up, and put the pulp in the reef. It stuns the fish, and they can catch them. I decided not to try and eat one, and left it to the crab and the fish.
I got a great sunset and paddled back in the dark. A big dolphin surfaced right next to me in the dark and gave me a scare.
Truth: It is even more annoying when something goes wrong and you know better.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
We went to Rabaul/Kokopo last weekend to entertain some out of town guests.The town of Rabaul was destroyed by a volcano eruption in 1995. The volcano spewed out massive amounts of black ash.
The ash covered the town and it was so heavy that everyone’s roof collapsed, or almost everyone. A few brave souls kept their houses by shoveling the ash off day after day.The town is surreal the streets are covered. It sort of looks like a city after a big snowfall.
I went swimming in the hot water pools near the volcano, but my feet sank into the sand and I got burned by the lava underneath. Ultimate truth for this would be "Lava is HOT, and will mess you up if you fool with it"
We went to General Yamamoto’s old bunker from WWII. It has cool drawings on the ceiling of a map of the World. It’s all in Japanese so it’s hard to see what is what, but it looks like it has Japan at the center and everywhere else out at the fringes.
We also saw some Japanese barges in tunnels. The US heavily bombed Rabaul during the war so the Japanese kept their stuff in tunnels. The barges are on railcars, and then were wheeled into a cave to protect them. The guy who owns the land said the Japanese came back after the war and took the engines away. That’s pretty cheeky. You subjugate the local population, kill a bunch of them, start a big war that causes their home to be destroyed. Lose the war and run away, then come back and later and collect your stuff.
The local museum had a lot of cool WWII stuff. I didn’t have my camera that day, but took a bunch of pictures with my cellphone. That’s me on a WWII steamroller!!
The story accompanying the bomber was interesting. It was shotdown, the one guy who survived went to a Japanese prison camp. After the war, and over 20 years, he came back and found the wreckage, and they put it in the museum. It took him a couple of years to find it.
The other pile of wreckage is identified in the accompanying sign as a "reconstructed" American Corsair. If this their idea of reconstructed, I'd like to see what an un-curated exhibit looks like.
-Klingon the pig as a grown-up. I had a dream about a pig before I moved here, and I have been looking for a black-white-black pig with these colors.
-The pagan dancers for Easter.
-A lumber camp on the side or the road. They take the good logs away, but the junky ones get processed here by a small portable sawmill.
-Kate showing people their pictures that she took.
-A canoe on the water. These guys were all out trying a new fishing technique.
It took all week to get out kayaking, but I finally did on Friday afternoon.
I just took a slow lap around NusaIsland, and paddled out to the point where our new house will be, if it becomes our new house. Not much has happened on that front in over a month, so we are disappointed. It was looking really good there for a while, then progress slowed to a crawl and stopped. We spoke to the landlord earlier this week, and she is still waiting on the carpenters to do more work on the kitchen. She was upset that they weren’t working so it still seems to be a go…
It was very calm on this day, a small surf break, but the tide was way out so it was not safe to surf at all. From talking to the board surfers it seems high tide is the best time because there is the most water over the rocks then.
I saw a stand-up paddle boarder from Nusa. One of the guys out there has offered to let me try it, so I have to go back when I have more time.
Truth: Sometimes things don't work out as planned.
We had a rough weekend trying to have a vacation trip over Easter. We took a trip “down the highway”, which is what everybody says when they go out of Kavieng. There is only one highway, and only one direction to go, so that is actually pretty descriptive. It turned into a highway to hell trip.
We met a guy at Nago Island a month or so ago who told us fantastic stories about Japanese WWII planes crashed in the jungle near his wife’s village at the other end of the island and he offered to take us down there on a sightseeing trip, so we decided to take the plunge and do it.
It was 12 hour drive each way. The highway got smaller and smaller turning to a crushed coral road, and eventually just 2 tire tracks in the dirt. At many places we had to drive through rivers because there were no bridges.
We got all the way down there and then we had all kinds of problems with the local people. Our guide had not told them we were coming, and he didn’t have the right people lined-up to take us up into the woods. It is actually difficult to get this kind of message sent because it is basically a game of telephone. The cellphones don’t work in this area, so to send a message he needs to find someone who is headed to that village, and ask them to give the people there a message.
At any rate we spent the first morning going from village to village via boat, trying to arrange a local guide. At one village the chiefs couldn’t agree to let us go onto their land, or that’s what we think happened anyway; at another the people who knew the way had all gone for the day, etc etc… Eventually we ended up in a place called “Moricon”, by the end of the trip I was calling it “Mordor”….
A bunch of young local guys came with us, to help guide us, and help us with our equipment. We weren’t that worried about actually finding the plane, and decided that we didn’t care if they couldn’t find it, but we wanted to camp up in the jungle for the night. We hiked 4 hours up a river bed and they showed us a rusty piece of metal that didn’t look like anything that came off a plane.
It took us a while to realize it, but there was then a big disagreement with our guide and the local people, and it turned out they didn’t want to let us stay in jungle for the night. We tried arguing the point, but the guy who was carrying the water had already dumped 90% of it out, so we were kind of screwed. It is very very hot, and you can’t live without water. This trail was high-up the side of a mountain, and there was no water available to purify, so we had to go back.
There were a series of other setbacks and problems, the worst being that the next day we found out they had stolen things out of our bags when carrying them. We were forced to hire some of the local guys to carry our stuff, and we often got separated from them on the path. It was impressive to watch these young guys with bare feet, briskly hiking up over tree roots and rocks with very heavy packs. They went much much faster than we could. We couldn’t come close to keeping up with them.
We were angry and upset, and didn’t really trust them the next day when an alternate hike was proposed, so we spent the day in their village. It was Easter Sunday and they did a church service/sing-sing to celebrate.
We met a bunch of guys fishing from outrigger canoes. They were trying a new kind of deepwater fishing using a really long line with multiple hooks. One guy had learned it at a local training session, and he was teaching all the others.
We chatted with them for a while, and eventually bought one of their canoes to take home with us. We now have another boat to paddle!
A sing-sing is their traditional dance performance. I have seen a couple of them now, but this was the first one that was tied to a Christian religious ceremony. About ½ way through Easter service a bunch of guys come out of the woods doing a traditional dance and chanting. They make little wood ceremonial staves to use during the dance. These were interesting they were canoe paddles on one side, and axes on the other. The axe or machete is never far away in all their decorations at these things.
Since it was Easter the axe paddles are painted with Christian slogans “Em Nau King of Kings” or “Jeru - salam” or “Hapy Aister”. You can see in one pictures the guys have made little wood knives, with crosses cut in them, and a kid behind is carrying a bible, while the dance across the sand, doing a pagan dance, and enter the Church. It is a funny mix of different belief systems, but they seemed to have something for everyone.
Anyway we still haven’t managed to go camping, but we did get to see the jungle along with getting jerked around and ripped off, so it was an expensive and painful walk in the woods.
Email to my friend who gave me the grill in question.
vvvvvvvv Hi B,
So Kate and I come back from a very difficult Easter weekend where aholiday went a bit out of control, and then there is a blackout in town.
The problem turns out to be the fact that the power company didn't paythe bill to fuel supplier and they cut them off. The power company wasactually telling people this as their excuse.
I found some expensive organic beef in one of the supermarkets that Iwas saving in the freezer. If your house is over 95 degrees and thepower goes out on your fridge for 16 hours you have a problem.I think, Ha no problem. We will have a nogat power party. (nogat meansno in tok pisin).
So we have some people over and I get the food ready by flashlight. Ilight the grill and go back upstairs to have a beer and entertain theguests while the grill "warms" up.Well into my beer I notice an orange light from the front of the house.I actually thought the power had gone back on. Hmm... A sarcasticAustralian surfer says "maybe your house is on fire Ha Ha..."
Anyway the power wasn't back on, but the grill had caught fire. Itburned off the fitting where the gas goes in the grill and I had ahomemade flamethrower shooting huge flames onto the side of the house,this was turning into a "nogood" party....
I managed to turn the gas off, but I think the grill is going to needsome work.I guess I'll give them a call, but this looks worse than when the glassbroke when you owned it.
I thought you would appreciate this pictureNotice both burners are at FULL THROTTLE....
