Diving in Kosrae

Our first Leaf fish

Despite the rain today, we’ve had a lot of fun.  We took a dive boat out on the reef and did a two tank dive with the Nautilus Resort.  It turned out to be quite the trip as we were the only people on the boat!  The coral here is absolutely beautiful – kind of hard to even capture in pictures – and it’s everywhere.  The fish are not huge but there are lots of them and we even saw a few things we’ve never seen before (our first leaf fish!).  We don’t splurge on this too often because it is quite pricey to go out with a charter service and when you have your own gear and even a compressor, it’s hard to make the case for it.  But we decided to go ahead and do it as our engine on our dinghy isn’t the strongest and we didn’t want to miss out on this great spot.  The icing on the cake was that they would pick us up (no lugging our crap across town) AND Jake could sit in the boat with the driver while we dove (free babysitter!).  Enjoy the pics…

The clown fish were a lot bigger here than anywhere we had seen.

These are clown fish eggs...just like Nemo!

Peacock Anenome Shrimp

Same leaf fish, different angle

Clown fish guarding their eggs

I was having a bad hair day.

To Convert or not to Convert...that was never the question

So, it’s funny, you spend your whole life avoiding those Jehovah Witness’ that come knocking on your door, right?  You hide behind the window, you mute the tv, whatever.  It only took me 30 seconds to invite a half dozen of them onto the boat.  (I know they’re reading this, but I think they get my sense of humor…)

There we were, at Treelodge Resort, eating their Friday night special of Mangrove Crabs.  Jake was playing with Mark and Maria’s son and Andy and I were getting to know some expats around the island.  Soon, Mark’s mother comes in and introduces herself as “Peggy Sue!  Buddy Holly made me famous!”  I would love to imitate her southern accent but I don’t know how…she sounded perfectly normal to me.  Peggy Sue is from Nashville, Tennessee and this is her first trip out of the country.  We enjoyed talking to her and getting a little slice of home as we commiserated about the lack of honey and yellow cornmeal around here and there’s no way you could possibly get any grits even if you tried. 

Jake playing with Ochi (short for Oceano, I think) while we
were having dinner.

Soon, I looked over and saw Jake talking to an entire table full of people.  So I got up and went over there to tell him not to “bug” them.  They said he was fine and they enjoyed him chatting them up.  It turns out one of the couples was thinking of buying a catamaran and sailing around as well and they had lots of questions.  I had a seat and we talked for a while about boats…then I tried to shut up (hard for me sometimes) and asked them what they were doing on the island.  I was sitting at a table of Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Three of them lived on the island and three of them were visiting.  Now I’ve met Jehovah’s Witnesses before but it was always one here or there (a kid in school and a date of a friend of ours at the Navy Ball one time, who incidentally didn’t stand up for the National Anthem), so I admit everything I think of them, is totally made up in my mind (consider the National Anthem incident).  I was wrong on all accounts and knew it immediately as I talked to these guys.  So, by the time Andy had come over, I had invited every one to the boat to take a look.

And so they did.  Unfortunately, only four of them were able to come over, but I think they enjoyed their stay.  They got to look around our boat, ask questions, and compare it to others they had seen or heard about.  We had some people do this for us when were just looking and it was invaluable to be able to finally imagine yourself in a particular space and then get to make decisions from there.  It was a sweltering hot day, but they took it all in stride and in the end, I think they had a good time.  We did gain a few books out of it (wink, wink), but maybe we made some friends too!

Kosrae, Micronesia

The biggest banana we've ever had!  It didn't
even fit in Jake's mouth.

We made it to Kosrae in exactly four days, arriving at the harbor at 9:00am.  This was one of our better, more comfortable passages although we did run into quite a few squalls.  When we arrived, we called Marine Services on channel 16 and they arranged for Customs, Immigration, Health and Quarantine to come out to the boat.  We temporarily tied up to the concrete pier and waited in some of the hottest, muggiest weather we’ve seen in a while.  While there was a good amount of paperwork, it all proceeded pretty quickly and we were done in a matter of two hours.  Our first impression was that these were the friendliest people we had ever met on our travels.  The way Andy put it was “they had life!”  So many of the places we go to, the people are either shy because they don’t speak good English, or for whatever reason, they just don’t talk much.  These guys told us where we could go eat, where we could snorkel and dive, and even made a few jokes.  The quarantine guy allowed us to keep our veggies but made us promise to eat them before we get to Pohnpei.  After we finished with them, we untied from the pier and anchored in about 35 feet of pure mud between Ace Hardware and what used to be the church.

If you look close at the landscape you can see the "Sleeping
Lady".  Her head is to the left of Savannah, laying on her back.

Our first day out was eventful.  We had to make our way to Immigration because they forgot to bring the stamp for our passports to the boat.  It was easily a 2-3 mile walk, but we were picked up by a nice retired policeman and his daughter after the first mile or so.  Evidently, it’s very common for people to give rides around here.  Then we went to a resort called the “Treelodge Resort” (caught another ride) and had lunch.  It’s owned by an American man named Mark and his Italian wife, Maria.  The resort itself didn’t impress much, but the restaurant is very quaint sitting on the edge of the mangroves and they had pretty good food as well.

We’ve done a lot of walking and packed in a good amount of stuff in the last few days.  We’ve gone to the Aquaculture Center where they spawn and raise a large number of giant clams, mostly for food consumption but they also sell to aquariums in the US and Europe.  We also went to the little one room museum and learned about some of the original ways of life here on Kosrae.  We tried to have “dinner and a movie” at Treelodge Resort.  Dinner was excellent (fantastic pizza) but the movie was rated R and not appropriate in the least bit for little Jake so we made our way back to the boat in our dinghy.  We got stuck in the low tide in the mangroves!  We thought we would be fine since the movie would last two hours, but since we had to leave early it didn’t give the water enough time to get back up…oops.  We made it back ok it just took a little longer than usual.

Each of these concrete tanks were filled with tiny "giant" clams.

This guy was scrubbing the tiny clams to get them ready to sell to
aquariums.

These clams are about a year old....3 inches or so.

Mangroves

The happy skipper

"Bully's Restaurant" at the Treelodge Inn

Jake is the one on top of the boy's shoulders.  They were
having "chicken fights."

Today, we rented a car and drove around the island (as far as the road will let you go….it doesn’t go all the way around).  We can’t get over how stinkin’ pretty this place is.  Flowers everywhere, banana trees, citrus trees, palms, Mangroves, Mango trees…  We met a great American couple that is here volunteer teaching at the highschool, Sarah and Craig.  They went snorkeling with us today and showed us the good places to go.  The water was a bit rough for me, but we did see some impressive coral and Jake got to play with the local kids again…chicken fighting, throwing seaweed on each other, etc.  Just seeing him come out of his shell the past few weeks with the kids is really cool to watch. 

Tonight we’re settling down and relaxing (we had a late night with Sarah and Craig on the boat last night so we’re kind of dragging!), planning the next fun thing for tomorrow.  I’ll try not to spill it all in this one post and save some for later.

Marshall Islands in Review

We're day two into our four day trip to Kosrae and I thought maybe I would do a little "Marshall Islands in Review" (you knew it was coming). I'll start with the positives…

Majuro, the capital, is a good place to re-provision regardless of where you're going. The prices are similar to American Samoa and the selection is large. If you can look past the roaches in the grocery stores and the expired dates on just about everything cold, you'll find it suits your needs adequately. Ok, not everything cold, but you do need to pay attention. Beer, wine and liquor is not cheap, but they do have a wide variety - mostly from the US and Australia.

The US Post office is here…that's a cruiser's dream as you can get anything you want shipped in at a fairly reasonable rate and in a reasonably good time frame (that's also the reason most cruisers get "stuck" in Majuro). There are also some folks who can help with freight shipping if your needs are a bit larger.

Americans can stay as long as we like and even work if we're so inclined.

The outer islands are beautiful and the people in them are too. That's probably the number one reason to visit the Marshalls.

There is a big cruising community here with the Mieco Yacht Club. Some see this as a positive, some as a negative…I find them mildly entertaining, a bit nosey and only slightly annoying…most of the time, very helpful, if not a bit grumpy. I mean that in the nicest of ways…

Now, for the not so great…
Majuro is dirty, as is Ebeye. The preferred method of garbage disposal is to throw trash in their back yards and have it taken away at high tide, if they can be bothered to bag it at all, making for a very disgusting, if not interesting, anchorage (it's the first time we saw an adult diaper floating by).
The people in Majuro aren't as friendly as the outer islands. It could be they're shy or their English isn't very good, but I equate it to any "big" city where the people are a bit more jaded than those in the rural areas and tend to not be as welcoming.
It rains a lot in Majuro. A lot.

We were fortunate enough to sample a number of intestinal bugs and the dengue while in Majuro. The cleaning habits of the restaurants would make anyone cringe. If you can't keep the critters out of the dining room, can you imagine what the kitchen looks like? A few cruisers swear they've never been healthier here but we can make a direct correlation between Majuro and how much toilet paper we need, if you know what I mean.

There is an easy way to avoid the above negatives…stay out of Majuro.

The only negative I can think of for the outer islands is the "gimme" attitude I spoke of earlier. But that's to be expected when you see the isolation they live in. How else can you get Tylenol if you don't ask? Oh yeah, and they poop on the reef…but this was actually entertaining to us as we usually only saw little kids do it and it was quite the social hour for them.

So, to anyone planning on visiting the Marshalls in the upcoming season…here's my advise: Check into Majuro, provision up, get all of your island permits and get the hell out. Visit the Ratak chain first (it's a lot easier to get back to Majuro if you need to), then if you want to go to Bikini, have an escape plan from there (i.e. check out of Majuro, go to Bikini, then head west to FSM) or plan on a great big bash back. All in all, we're glad we came though. Would we come back? Probably not, but it's a nice alternative to the other options of avoiding hurricane season and "following the pack." If we hadn't of come here, we wouldn't have met some really great friends and we wouldn't be heading to FSM right now…something we're all excited about.

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Jake, shooting target practice at a bunch of cans with
Morgan's BB Gun.

We run into kids just about everywhere we go, but usually they have different interests than Jake and/or have other friends and don't necessarily "need" him as much as he needs them.  So Jake just makes the best of it and we move on.  Here, it's going to be hard to move on...Wyatt and Morgan on s/v LoveSong and Jake are three peas in a pod.  The have the EXACT same interests and they're all in the same age range...5,6,7.  Jake has had an absolute blast here and for the first time in a while, I actually feel bad about leaving.  They've played nonstop since we got here.

But all good things must come to an end (or at least lead to other good things, right?).  We're checking out of the country today and heading out in the morning.  We should be in Kosrae early next week (500 miles) and we are super excited.  I'm trying to prepare myself for all the rain, but other than that, it should be a huge change of scenery.  Kosrae is one of the less visited islands in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), but we hear the people are extremely friendly and that it's a beautiful place complete with hiking trails, waterfalls and mangroves.  Even better, we should be going downwind so Jake and I might actually be able to keep our lunch down!

He paid more attention to Alan and his instructions than
he ever has in school!

Pictures from Aur

And here are the rest of the pictures from our last few weeks...these are from Aur atoll, both the island of Tobal and Aur.

The "Girl's Club"

Jake enjoying his new friends.  He doesn't look the least bit shy, huh?

This picture reminds me of the bachelor...I think he's about ready to give out a rose.

All good things must come to an end.

These little girls helped me pick seashells.

These Horned Helmets covered the bottom under the boat.
Very beautiful.  Did I mention they were tasty too?

I think this was actually in Maleolap...the school teacher's home.

Kendra's class.

Jake playing frisbee with the local kids on Tobal.

Jake, attending school in Tobal.

This was just the first round of coconuts we received.  We ended up with
over two dozen!

Last, but certainly not least.....the Mayor of Aur.

More pictures...

Here are some of the underwater pictures from the diving on Maleolap.

John, posing with some unexploded ordinances (you can't see his hammer in this picture)