Again, thanks to Jim and Helen aboard SV Gaia for sharing their newsletter about Hermit Islands. We were unable to make it there, although we did try very hard to do so.
Hermit Islands - by Jim and Helen of SV Gaia
After returning to Gaia from our trip to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea we left the mainland for the security of the Hermit islands. We had heard and read great things of the Hermits that made it sound like 'paradise'. We were looking fwd to a place where we could feel safe and where we could get in and under the water. Our underwater experiences in the south west Pacific had been disappointing since before New Zealand and the Hermits where supposed to remedy that. With that in mind after entering the atoll through the west pass we headed first to the south west islands shown along the bottom of the picture.
We knew the islands were uninhabited and hoped the villagers on the main island would not mind our rudeness for a few days. Our first night at anchor was heavenly although there was a breeze out of the northwest, the one direction to which we were very exposed as the reef shown encircling the islands is very low. We watched the birds fish the nearby reef, snorkeled some and looked forward to getting to the outside of the reef where all the big denizens of the deep hang out, but during the second night the wind came up out of the south-west and we were up often doing the hated anchor watch.
Well protected by the islands to the west and south we hoped for moderation to allow us to go snorkeling but during the late afternoon the wind increased and veered to the west-north-west, so we lost the protection of the islands. As it was too late to move elsewhere through the reefs inside the lagoon we decided to put out another anchor, which in the now strong winds and big waves, with the island and reefs lusting at us from behind, took four hours of hard toil in the dark. Rowing an anchor out with 250 feet of ¾” nylon rode in waves that broke over the bow of the dinghy and a howling wind while being unable to see how far away one is from the mother ship in pitch darkness is not our definition of Paradise!
After an all-night anchor watch with the bowsprit burying in the incessant waves, the wind dropped the next day. We recovered both anchors and moved to the village. A Lucky Move! That night the wind got up to fourty knots. A huge Bunyan tree that had been standing since before the island was settled (more about that later) blew down crushing a couple of Taiwanese fishing boats (more about that later as well). The storm also flattened one of the villagers cooking houses.
Through the grapevine we heard that seven people lost their lives in the Admiralty islands, the next group to the east. Had we stayed in our exposed, but oh so idyllic and tempting location, doing what we like best, we would have had to change our names to Crusoe and these newsletters would have come to a sad and premature although temporary end. It was Helen's birthday, a birthday she will not ever forget!
As it was we got to know a special group of people, the Hermit Islanders, and were welcomed in their pretty village and perhaps, just maybe, that will be a longer lasting memory than those of the treasures of the deep that we came to seek here. The Hermit Islanders are, with their Ninigo neighbours fifty or so miles to the west, amongst the most isolated of all the PNGers. A few hundred miles from anywhere with no phones, no air strip, no TV, no roads as they have no vehicles, no ferry, no Internet, no power, except that which they make for themselves with portable generators, no hospital nor clinic, no doctor not even a nurse, no working HF radio, no stores, no community water nor sewage. No police. Just a seemingly very happy cohesive group of people with a life largely centred on and knitted together by the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
Some few hundred souls call the low, flood prone sandy connection between two high parts of the main island home. We never got the same number when we asked. It seems not to be known or cared about. Flooding of their little piece of the world's real estate, which would only take a very nominal rise in sea level would force them up into higher country and they would lose their coconut trees and the one and only mango tree that still bears fruit on part of the tree. They get slightly brackish water out of the ground from very shallow wells that seem only feet away from the salt water but the water table must be fed by water that falls on the high parts of the island where they also have their gardens. These shallow wells are used for impromptu showers as shown in the picture.
The other use of bathrooms is taken care of in outhouses over the lagoon's water reached by invariably long raised walkways If you have diarrhea here the whole world knows. Fish they have aplenty. In fact the fishing is so good inside the reef and out that they have sold fishing rights on the reef for the huge Napoleon Wrasse and coral trout to a Taiwanese company that stores the live fish in their boat and also stores many in floating pens built off of the beach. Live fish command a high price in Taiwan! The islanders are hired by them and provided with heavy fibreglass dories complete with motor. They get paid by the fish or pound caught and thus they are a part of the cash economy. Every few months or so the Taiwanese boat needs to go to the Admiralty islands and they take 70 or 80 of the islanders charging them plenty of their hard earned Kina for passage and for any freight they take or bring back. With the cash they buy TV sets and DVD players, radios or boom boxes etc obtainable only from the Admiralty Islands two hundred miles and a long open boat ride to the east . More about that later. And cigarettes! One day we were visited by four young lads and asked for smokes. When we expressed surprise by saying we thought you were SDA they replied with laughter and said, " that's all right we are back sliders"! We gave them some leaf tobacco we had bought as the expected and traditional gifts to Solomon island chiefs and newspaper which they use to make the cigarettes and then felt bad about it. If we are going to do that kind of thing we might as well carry the cancer sticks.
Another backslider, Namo, we got to know rather well is a very bright individual with a prodigious memory. He is the village's outboard mechanic and walks very poorly as he had contacted polio on the mainland when small. He and one other child were the only survivors of about 80 kids with polio, and only because his dad worked for the missionaries and they managed to get him the needed medicine. He taught us much about the islands recent history which started a in the late eighteen hundreds when the famous or is it infamous 'Queen' Emma had a coconut plantation there. Although the plantation is long gone the captain of one of her boats settled on the island and had seven sons. The sons, one of whom we spoke with, got themselves wives from Ninigo and that has been the modus operandi ever since. Still, the young men and women get partners in Ninigo and either live in the Hermits or in Ninigo. Thus, with the exception of a few like the pastor and the head-mistress, the islanders are all related.
We mentioned the electronics. Anything electronic, as we so well know, does not last long in the salt laden atmosphere of boats or of these low islands where surf is daily music. Being white and therefore, seemingly in their eyes, all-knowing, Jim was asked to repair four different DVD players and the village's defunct HF radio with which they can call for emergency medical help If it works. It, a gift from a sailor, did not and with Deep River friend Bob Howard's assistance via our radio email system we tried to help. Even with Bob's expert long distance guidance it was beyond our nonexistent expertise and that also applied to the DVD players and a brand new TV set! The islanders did not know that they had hit the nadir of all my weak points! Frustrating but at least we modified their faulty opinion of "whitey".
Although most regions of PNG have their own distinct language the Hermits do not. They speak a language much like the people of Rabaul, it of the volcano on New Britain.
Now we must backtrack a bit: when we made our escape from our 'idyllic' anchorage we were guided into the approaches to the village by a very charismatic man, Stanley, who drove his boat quite some distance out of the way to see us safely through an area of patch reefs in the approach to the only village. Stanley, like most of the men, is a fisherman. One day he, proudly, came by with his catch of the day; sharks! He had, and was very pleased with, two large hammerhead sharks and a reef shark He catches them inside the lagoon on set lines and sells the fins to the Taiwanese. In this case at least, the rest of the fish is also used as feed for the live fish kept by the Taiwanese. Also with him in the boat where his two young girls both of whom tenderly cradled newly caught young birds in their laps to be kept as pets. We later were part of a church congregation, which Stanley, now all dressed in an immaculate two-piece suit, led. All the while we were there it blew like stink in squalls out of the west regularly climbing up into the thirties and that was with shelter from the remaining trees of the village. We were on a mooring as everywhere it was deep and corally but our mooring consisted of old half inch polyethylene line tied around a coral head so most of the time we were nervous
One day just as we were about to attend their church and baptism service that we were invited to, another squall came through and we were late for church. The service was performed in the not quite finished new church with the aid of two large colour tvs and various of the village's elder men led the service. Children also participated. We never did see the pastor during the service in the church, but did meet him afterwards at the baptism: We really preferred the old church shown in this picture with an old oxygen tank as the church bell.
After the service was the baptism. A section off the beach, well away from the aforementioned walkways, was cordoned off and decorated. In the background you can see Gaia and the Taiwanese fishing boat.
Before the ceremonies three of the village ladies sprinkled flowers on the water and a parent of each teenager to be baptized waded in chest deep around the periphery. Then, after a short prayer, every young lady or gent to be baptized was escorted into the water, handed over to the pastor and dunked backwards. His or her parent would then accompany him or her back out of the water. It was all very serious and solemn. One could not help but smile however when the stoutly-built but very height-challenged pastor would attempt to dunk the young and often hesitant young male teenagers which towered above him.
We had regular visits on GAIA, which only happens in places where we feel really comfortable with the locals. One young man, Millar, who visited us regularly, is a teacher. He had ambitious plans with which we tried to help him via our radio email facility. He wanted to take correspondence courses! Most ambitious in a place like the Hermits! One day Millar came by with two of the Hermits best-in-the-world pineapples of which we received daily gifts and we got talking about the ocean voyages that his forefathers undertook regularly in their canoes, a subject with which he was quite familiar as a lot of the knowledge of those canoes and navigation methods comes from the Ninigo islanders. When we showed him David Lewis's now old classic 'We The Navigators' which deals exhaustively with this fascinating subject, Lewis being one of the world's pre-eminent researchers and participants. Millar, who was born in the Ninigos, pointed out some of the people shown in the photographs in the book and said my uncle or some such. Very exciting! We later met Bob, the only villager who still sails an outrigger canoe (“ah, the young ones just want outboards, noise and speed”)and he came by one day in his blue tarp sailed craft going like the wind Incredible! He would run rings around us!
A day of so later some young lads took the boat to go fishing out on the reef to the east and a vicious squall came through again When they had not returned by nightfall we became quite concerned but appeared to be the only ones worried. Thankfully for naught.
The islanders have an active school system up to grade eight. For High School they have to leave the island. We volunteered to take class pictures and presented the teachers with full page glossy colour photos for each class that turned out quite well. After that we avoided the school during school hours as we were a great distraction for the students as the pictures show. It also shows the teacher's baby on her desk, no need for babysitters here!
We had some long and interesting discussions with Mary, the head mistress, a quiet thoughtful lady that we got to like a lot. Her husband is a teacher as well, but he has a job in the Admiralty Islands where he lives with their children as they are of high school age. In this picture Mary and Helen chatting, Mary's cook house is in the background. Another lady teacher we met up with several times was very pregnant and talking about perhaps going to the Admiralty islands to have the baby.
Roughly once a month the villagers go for gasoline and diesel fuel to the Admiralty islands, 200 open-ocean nautical miles away! That is 400 kms! In an open perhaps twenty foot long boat powered now by two outboard motors! It was not always thus, a very large wooden canoe some fourty or more feet long, still on the beach, was the previous mode with one motor! Of course a long time ago they would sail and we opined that that was perhaps a lot safer! Right at the end of our stay they were off once more with eighteen empty 45 gallon drums on board and seven people one of whom was the 8 month pregnant teacher who had developed complications with the pregnancy. They now carry a GPS, the simple ones designed for bush travel and on its chart we saw a number of the last tracks We checked one of their way-points, at their request, to a different island and let me tell you we have never been as careful to get it right! We went over to their boat before they loaded the drums and were dismayed to see the turtles brought from Ninigo to sell in the Admiralty, waiting to carry the drums on top of them.
Before they left we gave them the weather forecast as we received it i.e. the NOAA computer forecast, the only type of forecast available to us here. They seemed happy to hear about the benign weather awaiting them, and us. We could go on and on. We both felt the place ought to be protected and even at one point considered contacting various groups that fund that kind of thing but somehow it seems presumptuous There are people on the island that are concerned and we helped drawing up reasonable and workable rules for visiting yachts. We gave our opinion about what they should allow, and what and where they ought to protect, limit or even deny access but also suggested they get expert help. We typed and printed and did the best we could but the real problem lies not with visiting sailors of which there are very few but with the exploitation of a very limited marine resource in an unsustainable manner. Trying to convert people to careful husbandry for the future when they themselves have so little of what they see others have in such abundance is very difficult and made more so when they are visited by outsiders who want and are willing to pay for the little they have and who seem to carry diddly squat for the consequences.
When we left somewhat later that day, bound for Palau in Micronesia the wind came up out of the west and it took us four hours to motor the ten miles to get out of the lagoon with the wind gusting to 33kts. We felt great empathy with our friends to the east already well out into the open ocean! At least they were going down wind and wave with an as yet light load. Until their return!
Jim and Helen on board sv GAIA