The Cook Islands and Fiji by Barry Pomeroy

Author:Barry Pomeroy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cook islands, fiji, teaching overseas, rarotonga, manihiki, cyclone martin
Publisher: Barry Pomeroy

Going to Rakahanga

The first suggestion I had that my dream of island-hopping might come true despite the huge distances between the islands was that a boat which had been making for Rakahanga hadn’t arrived. Apparently it was piloted by two young men, and they had neglected to take an extra motor—a precaution nearly everyone other than me considered for inter-island travel. There was some discussion on Manihiki about how much water they had taken, as well as food, but in the broadness of the South Pacific there was little we could do on our tiny island.

Rarotonga sent up a plane to search, and although the men had been adrift for two days, they were sighted in a few hours. The plane couldn’t do more than indicate to the boat that they’d been seen, however, and a military ship was dispatched from the main island. That was 1200 kilometres away, however, and they needed a few days to arrive. The plane came back, took another sighting and this time made more careful note of the boat’s coordinates, and dropped a few supplies. Before long the ship had arrived, and the men were taken to shore.

The incident began a whole discussion about whether people should be allowed to just motor to the next island as they willed. The cost of sending a frigate had been prohibitive, although normally they did nothing other than sit in dock anyway, and the worry of the relatives had been consuming. I didn’t know going to Rakahanga was possible, and for me the discussion about government restrictions was fraught with the possibility that I might not be able to go.

At around the same time that this discussion was underway, a Kiwi photographer flew to Manihiki. He came around to visit me once he heard there was a Canadian school teacher on the island, and he talked about his work. In fact, he mostly talked about himself. Many of his stories were worth hearing, such as when he went to the shore of a high volcanic island by walking down a sheer cliff on ancient steps carved from the rock and then putting to sea in a tiny boat like a small outrigger. Because the fishers had to carry the boat up and down the cliff, it was necessarily light, and he told me that was especially important when he saw a huge great white shark maintaining its position in the shade of his boat. The local man had pointed it out, and gestured to him to be quiet, for with one flick of its tail the shark could have smashed the thin hull and then picked them out of the water at its leisure.

Perhaps because I would listen to his stories, and I was one of the few people who spoke English well enough for him to enjoy my company, he talked to me a few times before he invited me to meet the mayor, who he was staying with while he took photos on the island.

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