We've been in Pohnpei for about three weeks now, and, as always, there are things we like quite a bit about this place, and things that are not ideal. The biggest bonus of all has been that we've been able to get the refrigerator repaired here. It had been acting up for quite awhile, but finally decided to quit completely just as we pulled into the harbour here. Obviously having anything as important as the box that keeps the wine cold die on you is a big problem, we were grateful that the fridge waited till we got here to die completely. There was definitely no way to fix it in the Solomon Islands and having it die mid-passage would really be depressing. Luckily for us, here in Pohnpei there are both hardware stores that stock the freon we need and a knowledgeable and friendly man with the gauges you need to put the freon in, and US mail delivery here so that we could get the new compressor in a timely manner and without spending an extra fortune to have it shipped here. All of this is made a bad situation much better than it could have been, but a broken fridge is still a bad situation. However, the new fridge has been in for about a week and is working great and seems to be using a lot less power than the old one was, which is no big surprise since it was running full out full time towards the end.
Pohnpei is a fairly large, mountainous island with a surrounding reef. The reef is a few miles out from the shore in some places and is fairly deep, but also has little mini reefs and some small islands sprinkled around inside it. The good part about this is that the harbor is very sheltered and you can motor around inside the reef and be in pretty protected waters. The bad bit is that the big island does not have hardly any beaches, it has lots of mangrove fringed areas. Here the lack of beaches doesn't just mean no good sunbathing it also means not being able to swim from shore in many places, so although there is great snorkeling and diving out on the reefs you need a boat to get there. For us it means that although we can swim off the boat (something we've been really looking forward to since the Solomon Islands!) we can't see the bottom and there is no nearby snorkeling. But the harbor is very protected and quite calm even when the many rain storms through.
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| Row of wrecks |
The harbor is also home to a lot of abandoned, large commercial vessels in various stages of sinking. Most of them appear to be way more recent than the WWII. I don't quite understand why there are so many here, or conversely why there aren't so many other places, but we have taken to joking calling Pohnpei the wreck snorkelers paradise.
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| An older wreck |
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| Pohnpei anchorage - Ocean View hotel is the big building on the hill |
From the Ocean View Hotel it is a fairly short walk to the near part of town, but a fairly long walk to the far side of town. Taxis are very inexpensive here and we used them a lot. Frankie, our favorite taxi driver, had his birthday while we were here, so we gave him a Wise Guy's shirt to remember us by.
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| Fred and Frankie |
Other good things about Pohnpei - did you catch the part where I said there was a hardware store here? Well, actually there are two, an Ace and a True Value AND a Napa Auto parts. The hardware stores are both huge, and it's not an exaggeration to say that I walked the aisles drooling for about five minutes on my first visit there. We've not seen anything like this on the boat since New Zealand.
There are also a couple good supermarkets here, and they are stocked with products from the US. We are seeing BBQ sauce, canned chili and pickles for the first time in a long, long time. It's funny how exciting that is. So much of the food that is available to us is the same thing over and over again that any variation becomes a pretty big deal. Ever since we've left New Zealand all the countries we've been in have been supplied with either New Zealand or Australian products, and although many things are the same, many things are also just not available. Dill pickles are a big deal. In New Zealand they mostly have gherkins and since then we've seen only gherkins, but mostly no pickles at all. That's just not right.
The downside of the food being from the US is that the US is pretty far away, so many of the products are right at or past their expiration dates. Many stores have a shelf rack marked "Animal Feed" which is where they put the far out of date items and sell them for 50% or less. This may partially explain why the pigs here are so big. And, no, we didn't visit a farm to see a pig, Jeff and I saw one pass in town in the trunk of a small car. A really big pig in the trunk of a small four door car. It's legs were tied around a big stick and it's head was kind of sticking out the side because it was too big to fit down in the trunk. Fred also saw one being carried through town by two guys at either end of the stick. Apparently they like a good pig feast here in Pohnpei, and I certainly don't blame them!
Another interesting thing about food here is that every restaurant we've been to has sashimi on the menu. This includes the fancy places and the fast food joints. For example Arnold's, which was recommended to us by many locals, looks like your typical low budget strip mall eatery in the US and has a really good cheese steak sandwich, pizza, hot wings, salads - and sashimi. And the sashimi is delicious. There aren't different choices, it's whatever kind of tuna they got that day served very simply with soy sauce and wasabi on the side, or local style with ginger and lime. It's almost always one of the best things we get at any restaurant which surprises me again and again. It just seems so unusual to be getting sushi at the local burger joint and loving it.
The reason for all the US stuff is that Pohnpei, and all of Micronesia (formerly known as the Caroline Islands), has been closely associated with the US since the end of WWII. Sometime in the 1880s Pohnpei was claimed by Spain who then ceded it to Germany as part of the deals at the end of the Spanish American War. Then Japan took over at the beginning of WWI and was later awarded trustee ship of the islands after the war by the League of Nations with the caveat that they not build military bases or attempt to colonize the islands. However, there was apparently no oversight of this arrangement, and sometime before WWII Japan pulled out of the UN and still nobody thought to revoke their control over these islands, so Japan went right ahead and built a huge military base on Truk (which is west of Pohnpei, and where we are headed next). So, after WWII the US took control when the Japanese surrendered to us and later the US was given the protectorship of the islands. Pohnpei, Truk, Kosrae and Yap have since banded together and formed the Federated States of Micronesia, which still maintains close ties with the US. I mention all this here because it was all news to me when we got here. I knew the US had ties with Guam, but I knew nothing about FSM.
For today's visitor to Pohnpei what all this means is that the ATM gives you US cash, the cars and you meet a lot of Americans here. They are mostly employed as teachers in the college or work for groups who oversee the large sums of money this area receives via various charitable organizations. Most of them arrived here on an airplane, but there are a few folks here taking a break from cruising and living on their boats in the harbor while stopping here to work for awhile. We've also met a crazy irish/english couple Noel and Kathy. Kathy is teaching at the college while Noel is working on the boat. Noel qualifies as the very first person we met here since he was kind enough to call us on the radio when he saw us coming in to share some local knowledge. He also rowed over soon after we got our anchor down and became the first local member of our arrival celebration. Next, Glen, an American here on a sort of outrigger style catamaran that he built himself came over to say hello, then Noel went back to his boat and got Kathy and some homemade beer he had onboard, and we contributed the SolBrews we had brought from the Solomon Islands, and we had a real party on our hands. Very nice to have a warm welcome!
The next day we met John and Jean. They are teachers who have taught at many overseas locations, the last being in Trinidad. When they decided to move here John flew back and sailed their boat from Trinidad to here, so they have first hand knowledge of some of the trials of the cruising sailor like lack of local knowledge and a very limited supply of fresh water. They have been extremely kind to us during our stay here and have taken us diving and hiking and helped us with our mail and pointed us to Peter, a New Zealander who works here also, who has helped us with lots of repairs and driven Fred to the hardware store about a hundred times to get supplies. Big thanks to John, Jean and Peter!
Our first couple dive outings here were with John and some friends of his. They often go out on Saturdays with Anchur, a local business man who enjoys fishing and has the typical local style boat here which is a long open outboard style boat. We went out two Saturdays in a row with these guys and it was fun to meet everyone on the boat and a nice relaxed way to do some diving as well. We dove two different spots each day, usually in one of the passes through the outer reef. So first we'd zoom out about five to ten miles in the boat to the first spot, then try to figure out which way the current was going through the pass, and go to the correct end so we could drift down with it. Unfortunately, we weren't always quite right about which way it was going, so we would sometimes turn around and not go in the planned direction, but Anchur always found us at the end of the dive, so that was OK. It's amazing to see underwater the passes that you are taking the boat through. Very reassuring here because the walls of the passes really go almost straight down. The coral itself is not nearly as impressive here as some other places we have been, but we've really been to some amazing places and may just be getting quite spoiled. We did see a couple small reef sharks on our first dive here and on the second saw some very large schools of fish. After the first dive each day we'd get our gear off and have some lunch while Anchur did some snorkeling, and then zoom over to the next dive spot, dive there and then zoom home again at the end of the day. On the first day the tide was high enough that we got to come back through a mangrove passage between the main island and a smaller one. The mangroves met overhead and it was like being in a tunnel for quite a long way. Very beautiful.
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| Traveling through the mangroves on the dive boat |
We also did a couple days of diving with the only commercial dive shop on Pohnpei which runs out of the village Hotel. We had been told by many people that they were quite expensive, and I suppose that compared with going to Anchur it is expensive, but we thought it was well within the normal range of pricing for a commercial dive shop (the cost does vary quite a bit from place to place). We did one day of diving with them in the Pohnpei lagoon one stop of which was at Manta Rhodes where we were really close to some very large manta rays, some of which were stopped at cleaning stations and some of which were swimming around in a line of four doing "formations". It was amazing.
Our second day of diving with the Village was at Ant Atoll, which is about 10 miles outside the reef to the west of Pohnpei. This atoll has a very skinny but long and winding pass entrance to it and we dove both sides of it the day we were there. We saw a lot of reef sharks here as well along with a really big school of bumphead parrot fish. Getting out to Ant was a nice treat for us because we wanted to take the sailboat out there as well eventually, and this way we got a closeup preview of the pass from someone else's boat, which is a big plus.
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| Dive boat at Ant Atoll |
But I think my favorite part of diving with the Village was meeting Martin Reiser, a delightful guy from Germany who has taken a year off from work and is traveling around diving. Martin was great to chat with in general, and, another bonus for us personally, he has done a LOT of diving in Palau, one of the places that is in our future, and had great things to say about it and gave us lots of tips for our visit there. We had dinner with Martin after our second day of diving with him and he has a picture of us up on his website along with great photographs and video from many of the dives he has done.
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| View from the Village Hotel dining room |
A couple days after going with the dive guys to Ant we took God Spede there and anchored out for three glorious days. Ant atoll is currently uninhabited. It is a ring of coral with a couple long skinny islands on part of the ring and a big, deep lagoon within. We were the only boat anchored there, so we were the only ones there at night, but the Village Hotel's dive boat came out one day and another small boat was there another day, presumably for fishing. We took the dinghy over to the pass each day and did a lot of snorkeling. The visibility really varied at different parts of the pass each day, but there was one little cove where we could always clearly see the 60 foot bottom. There was amazing coral here, definitely the biggest patch of cabbage coral I have ever seen. Also, there was a black tipped reef shark and a white tipped reef shark that were in this little cove each time we went. We saw lots of other sharks also, by far the most sharks I've seen while snorkeling (not diving). I really enjoyed our stay there. It was so beautiful and peaceful. Very very relaxing.
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| God Spede at Ant Atoll |
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| Entrance pass to Ant Atoll looking out from the dinghy |
Now we are back in Pohnpei preparing to leave for Truk and waiting for a good weather window. We are really excited about the wreck diving in Truk which was Japan's equivalent of Pearl Harbor. The allied forces sunk about 60 boats during two days of bombing in WWII, and now it's a wreck divers playground. However, we are a bit apprehensive about security while we are there. We have heard from many different sources that the main town, Weno, where we must go to check in, is not very nice, and that we need to be very careful while we are there. Apparently it's normal to see a couple fights in the street every day and robberies are quite common. Our plan is to get in and out of Weno as fast as we possibly can, and then move south two miles and anchor off the Blue Lagoon Resort which also has a good dive operation. We've read blogs of other boats who've visited there and they've not reported any problems, and Martin, our new diving buddy, arrived there last week. He was kind enough to report back to us and he says there are no boats there now, but the resort's dive guide says that the boat will be safe there while we are out diving with them. We also hear that the resort has onshore showers that will be available to us after diving and good cheeseburgers - woohoo! We still plan to stay even at the resort for only a few days while we dive and then we will beat feet out of there. Of course, all these plans are open to revision after we get a look at the place, but we think that we can enjoy the diving there and get out unscathed.
