Tuesday, September 9, 2003

At Anchor, Suvarov Atoll, Cook Islands

Latitude S 13 degrees, 14 minutes

Longitude W 163 degrees, 06 minutes

Photos by J. Kosyna and C. Neunteufel

Dear friends and family: 

After a passage from Maupiti of a little less than five days, we found the small atoll of Suvarov, which is a Cook Islands National Park.  There are no buoys in the entrance to the only pass, but we had good advice from Charlie's Charts and from Vellamo, which arrived the day before us.

Suvarov is truly a tropical paradise -- relatively unspoiled, and full of interesting characters and lots of wildlife.  There are birds everywhere.  The terns sound like high-voiced versions of seagulls, seemingly in some amount of distress, and we can constantly hear their cries as they circle in the air.  We are told there are 200,000 terns here.  This information came from Dr. Wolfgang Losacker, a physician who has been here for four weeks, filming a documentary about the atoll and its caretakers.  Wolfgang is himself quite a character.  He's originally from Hamburg, an opera lover who travels to Sydney and Vienna for opera performances, and who practices medicine in Rarotonga. 

Wolfgang and "Lolly" (the fledgling booby). 

Wolfgang just got back from spending five days on one of the remote motus (islands) of the atoll, sleeping sometimes in his open sailing dinghy, and other times ashore among the terns.  He found a fluffy orphaned baby booby bird which he adopted, and we watched as he fed fish scraps to the baby booby (nicknamed "Lolly").  He spit on the scraps first, presumably so the booby would become bonded to him.  He said that after the booby flies off into the wild, he will come back to rejoin the human parent for short periods of time.  (Based on our mid-ocean booby experience last April, I'm not sure I'd want to be a parent to an adult booby!) 

Cori and Jens spent quite awhile talking with Wolfgang, and even got involved in filming the documentary (at least the parts about Lolly).  Wolfgang showed us several of his books, including lovely photographs and interesting text about practicing medicine in the South Pacific.  He even told Cori which bookstore in Vienna carries his books (Freytag und Berndt).  (See some of Wolfgang's English language books here.)

The caretakers -- Papa John and Baker -- are native Cook Islanders -- and are also very interesting characters.  We got to know them at the cruisers potluck, which takes place every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on Anchorage Island -- the biggest motu of the atoll.

Papa John goes out in the morning and catches appropriate seafood for the main dish.  Last night it was a big tuna, baked in an outdoor stone oven and presented wrapped in woven palm fronds.  At the formal start of the meal, after grace is said, the palm fronds are broken open along the spine, and there is the fish, in all his glory.  They made poisson cru (the Polynesian version of ceviche) from a jack tuna that Papa John caught.  They also made omelets from tern eggs, and coconut pancakes.  The contributions of the cruisers seemed kind of minimal after the huge effort of the caretakers.  We contributed pamplemousse (grapefruit) from Bora Bora.  Cori and Jens had found a seemingly public pamplemousse tree in their walk around Bora Bora, and they brought back 35 delicious pamplemousses.  I cut up five of them for our contribution, and they were very well received.  Fresh fruit is quite rare among cruisers who are not at one of the bigger islands.

Papa John is 71 years old, and is a free diver (without tanks) who can stay down 5 minutes.  He takes cruisers along on his fishing trips, and on trips to find coconut crabs and tern eggs.  We haven't seen this, but we've heard that he reaches his arm (up to the armpit) into crevices, to pull out huge coconut crabs, big enough to feed several people.  (These crabs have huge claws, and are apparently capable of cracking open coconuts, so I can't imagine sticking your hand down a dark crevice to find such a critter!).

The Ukranian boat, Batkivshchyna, is perhaps the most interesting of the other cruisers who are here.  They brought a map to the potluck, and showed us their route -- all the way from Kiev, 500 miles downriver, through the Black Sea, through the Mediterranean, and so on, over the course of the past four years.  It's an old schooner, black hulled, pretty crusty looking, with an experienced captain, his wife, and six or eight eager young men aboard.  Their mission is to acquaint other boaters with the Ukraine, and they are also providing some sort of training for some of the young men who are in the Ukrainian maritime academy.  The captain is loud and jovial, and the young men are quiet and intense.  Batkivshchyna means "fatherland" in Ukrainian.  Wolfgang found out the Ukrainian boat is leaving tomorrow for Rarotonga, and they are going to give him a ride.

The other black hulled boat in the harbor is the 125 foot Northwestern Star from Great Britain.  (This is one of those mega-yachts.  Most are built in New Zealand but this particular one evidently came from Italy.  They have two masts (seven spreaders total) and we may have seen them in the Marquesas.)  The masts are so tall they are required to have red lights on top at night, as warning to passing aircraft (no worries here!)  They have six people on board, all paid crew.  They will meet the owner in Tonga in October.  In the meantime, they're having themselves a great time, doing maintenance in the morning, and snorkeling, fishing, or going to potlucks in the afternoons and evenings. 

Also here are Dancer (we first met Jim and Jeannette in Tahanea), and Vellamo (we spent time with Phillip and Denise in Avea Bay and Maupiti).  We met for the first time Colin and Gloria (he a British Australian and she a Black South African) who couldn't say for sure where they were now "from" or "returning to."  Craig thinks he may have met Colin when Craig worked for the John Fluke Company and visited Colin's calibration lab in Sydney.  The tech talk got rather deep at that point in the potluck, and I went off to find other entertainment (as it turns out, Papa John's guitar playing).  We also met a couple from Vancouver, B.C., and several other people whose names I can't remember.  (The couple from Vancouver told us that although coconut crabs are good, they are nothing compared to Dungeness crabs from the Pacific Northwest.  Hopefully I'll have a first hand report on that for you within the next day or so.) 

Well, that's about it for now.  We're anticipating a rather exciting several days here, before we start the passage to Pago Pago, American Samoa.  Neither Cori nor I are terrifically enthusiastic about passage-making, but it seems necessary to get to beautiful, exciting places like Suvarov. 

Best wishes to all our friends and family! 

Craig & Barbara Johnston

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