Palmerston, Sep 29 - Oct 1, 2008

Palmerston, Sep 29 - Oct 1, 2008

We had a fairly uneventful sail to Palmerston which is an atoll in the middle of nowhere. It is part of the Cook Islands politically, but geographically it's out there by itself because the other Cook islands are in two groups, both about 200 miles away. Unlike the other atolls we had been to, there is no pass through the outer reef big enough for sailing boats to go through. The outside edge of the atoll drops off into deep water very quickly, but some mooring balls have been placed on a thin shelf outside the atoll on the west side of the island. This means that boats on these moorings are protected from rough seas from the east, but are exposed to any weather from the west. Mostly the trade winds here are from the south east, but when fronts come through the wind can shift to the west, so boats who stop here must keep an eye on the weather and be prepared to leave if a front approaches. Also, the mooring balls are sometimes full when you arrive, in which case you need to keep going because there are coral canyons on the sea floor here that can make retrieving your anchor impossible. So stopping here is a bit iffy since the moorings may be full if the weather is good, or you may not be able to stop at all if the weather is bad.

A front came through the area while we were on our way from Bora Bora to Palmerston, and we heard on the radio that many of the boats that were ahead of us that had planned to stop at Palmerston were going to continue on instead. The front was predicted to have passed the area by the time we got there, so we thought it might work out well for us, since the weather should be OK when we got there, and the moorings would not be full. On our last day in to Palmerston the wind died completely so we began motoring and hoping that we could reach the atoll with some daylight left, but towards the end of the day it became obvious that that was not going to happen. It can be quite dangerous to approach these atolls at night because there are errors in the charting for some of them, so you can't rely totally on your electronic navigation equipment, and the water is so incredibly deep until so very close to the shore of these atolls that your depth finder doesn't help that much either.

Once we realized it would definitely be dark before we got settled on a mooring ball, we decided that we would only stop if there was another boat moored there that we could raise on the radio and ask to turn lights on for us to steer towards. In this case we could have swung around the island wide to the west and come in with no hazards between us and the other boat. We began calling for any boats moored there when we were around the corner still, so we couldn't see that the moorings were all empty - there were no boats there. However, a gentlemen who lives on the island, Bob, answered our radio call and said he could guide us onto the mooring balls by radio. Apparently the people who live on Palmerston use the VHF as their local phone system, which makes a lot of sense - there certainly isn't any other maritime traffic they would be interfering with!

So Bob was talking to Fred on the radio telling Fred when to turn and when to start slowing down, etc. He told Fred that the moorings were about 50 meters away from the reef, but this message didn't get passed along to Jeff who was standing at the front of the boat peering into the darkness trying to spot a mooring ball, so Jeff almost had a heart attack when he saw breakers much much closer than he thought they should be. As Jeff was shouting for Fred to turn around NOW, Bob came back on the radio and said we were in the right spot, and luckily, while we were turning, we spotted a mooring ball and we all breathed a big sigh of relief.

After we got the boat tidied up, Jeff made dinner and we sat down and watched an episode of The Wire (we watch DVDs on the laptop) and then, because the wind still hadn't shifted all the way to the east, which it was supposed to have done earlier in the day, Fred volunteered to stay up and watch another movie and keep on eye on things until it did shift. This is called an anchor watch, and was necessary because the mooring was sooooooo close to the reef that if anything on the mooring system or our line to the mooring had broken, then we would be blown onto the reef in a very short amount of time. The wind finally did shift during Fred's late night movie and he wound up going to bed around 2 AM. Therefore, he was not all that thrilled when our new friend Bob came out to visit us at 6 AM the next morning, despite the fact that Bob was a nice guy who spoke English. English! We had finally left French Polynesia and reached some islands where the official language is English. Hurray! Bob invited us to his house for lunch, which we understand from other cruisers is the normal thing here. There are about 50 people who live on Palmerston Island, and about 30 of those are children, so I guess the grownups get pretty excited to talk to someone other than themselves. We declined on lunch, wanting to just rest up and get a few things done on the boat. We were glad about this decision later, after we talked to other cruisers who did go ashore for lunch. Some said they really enjoyed the island visit, but others said they felt like they had been kidnapped because the locals take you in through the reef to the island on their boats, since getting even a dinghy through the passage in this reef is tricky, and lunch apparently turned into an all day affair, so they didn't get back to their boats until 4 PM, which was not at all what they had expected.

Instead we had a nice day doing some projects and giving the boat a good clean and then we went for a fabulous snorkel outside the reef. The coral there was really nice and there were interesting canyon formations underwater. These canyons are a big part of the problem with anchoring here, but they also seemed to be home to some big beautiful fish. We also saw the biggest turtle of the trip here. Then, we got back to the boat and Jeff went below to make some lunch and while Fred and I were adjusting some things on deck they heard a funny sighing sound and looked up and saw a huge whale about 50 feet away from the boat. It was already diving down by the time they looked up, so they saw the back and the tail only, but I thought I saw it swimming right under the boat. Fred belatedly had the good idea to put his mask back on and jump back in the water, but the whale was already gone by the time he got in. He wasn't sure whether to be sad or relieved, since he was the only one that had gotten in, and therefor would be the whales only target if it did not care for swimming buddies. The whale surfaced quite a ways away, so we didn't get another good look at it, and even though I stayed on whale watch in cockpit for the remainder of the afternoon we didn't see it again. Other folks who were there a few days later told us they got to watch a whale feeding it's baby (calf?) for quite awhile, so of course we were jealous, but they also had a small cruise ship stop while they were there, which they didn't enjoy at all, so in cruising also you win some and you lose some.

We did have a nice chat with Bob and his wife, whose name I just can't remember, when they came out again later that afternoon. We had invited them over to say thanks for helping us get in the night before, but when they arrived they told us that they were not allowed to come aboard since we had decided not to check in with customs and immigration while we were there. We hadn't done that since this was the only Cook Island we were stopping at and we were just there for a quick rest and did not intend to go ashore. We still had a nice, although short, chat with them while they sat in their boat and we sat on the side of God Spede looking down on them. They brought us some coconuts and we gave them some soda. They told us that they eat mostly fish and lobster, which they said were ridiculously easy to catch there, and which they are sick of - what they really like is canned corned beef - did we have any extra? They also told us that the island was out of tobacco because the supply ship only stops by on an irregular basis and it had been awhile. We wondered later if they were able to buy any smokes off the cruise ship when it came by a few days later.

As we were leaving Palmerston the next morning, Bob called on the radio again to say he was out on the reef fishing and if we could wait a few minutes he would bring some fish over. He brought four parrot fish and filleted them for us in about two seconds flat. Eating parrot fish is new to us, it doesn't seem to be done in the Caribbean, and we're not sure if that's a cultural bias or to avoid fish poisoning which there is none of on Palmerston. Jeff cooked it up for lunch in a delicious lemon butter sauce and we thought it was much like snapper in both taste and texture.