Majuro's sickening high spring tides
18 November 2010 | Majuro lagoon
kathy
We had such an amazing weekend out at Eneko that I just have to write about it. It was the calmest, driest, most beautiful weekend we've ever had there. The only disappointment was that we didn't wake up there Saturday morning after departing town as usual on Friday, since the working man has trouble getting out of work!
Our relatively new friends on S/V Casteele (more Canadians) were there with their two kids, a boy almost 5 and a two year old girl that the boys were happy to have as beach playmates. I had found some monstrous wood panels with windows cut out that I dragged up to the tree we hang out under and propped them together to make a playhouse. The dogs were most appreciative, kids not so much. From there we hiked about 50 feet back into the scrub to search for what we were told was a real leftover US WWII encampment that we had never known was so close by in all our time spent there. It was pretty amazing, some concrete stacks for a radio tower or gun placements or something, with a pretty large footing surrounding the old concrete floor for what must've been barracks and offices. There was still a sidewalk around the back leading to a water trough, which holds an endless supply of freshwater guppies (of which 8 babies were spilled from their jar across the galley counter the other night, slippery tiny little buggers which all survived the mishap!). We found some old metal army jeep parts, a Delco battery box, and some old broken Coke bottle shards. It was pretty cool.
Later when we were playing frisbee golf down the beach, we lost the frisbee in the scrub and Allen pulled out some 2x2 fiberglass/aluminum honeycomb E&E compartment hatch (electronics equipment) from a military aircraft of undetermined age (you could still read the stenciled letters faintly and the fancy toggle buttons still worked!) Bizarre. We gave it to the island owner, who has already quite a collection of relics in a glass case. Really cool.
We spent two days paddling like mad (Allen in between painting sections of the foredeck BRIGHT YELLOW) in the calm lee of the islet, and Sunday the boys went surfing on their boards behind the dinghy. Morgan can easily stand up on his, and Wyatt's just happy to hang on. Although visibility was so clear it was amazing, we didn't think about snorkeling though until Monday morning, Valentine's Day. This was monumental for Wyatt, in his wetsuit with no water wings, to actually snorkel for more than half an hour without complaint (we had trouble keeping up with him actually)! The second we dropped in behind Love Song there were 2 spotted eagle rays beneath us that we were absolutely thrilled to see. We saw a pair of gorgeous yellowmask angelfish swimming with a stately Morish Idol, which I love for its' banner trailing all around its' head like one of those Olympic ribbon twirlers. STELLAR!
So, we had a beautiful time out there, with a wonderful week of activities in town with the locals. We met one of the local artists and Morgan is painting a WWII airplane picture with him while Wyatt and I play frisbee and tag in the grass lawn outside the courthouse and library. There's some turtles in tanks that we stop and see when we go by another place, and Wyatt rode his bike all the way to Coop schoo land back yesterday just to see if he could do it. He did, although it was not without heavy whining and a major crash. We have also had strange weather with little or no wind except for one day when the first westerly we've ever seen blew like stink and put us on a lee shore, very unnatural for this time of year. So, we are back in front of Shoreline with the big boats and the huge wakes of the tuna boat tanks ferrying their men in and out of shore at all hours of the day and night, and now the tides are high with the full moon and they are washing everyone's trash off their walls, beaches, heap piles, as well as the regular junk washed up along the regular shoreline, and it's one giant garbage can. We were terribly distraught to get into our dinghy at the shoreline with a dead dog floating right there. HORRIBLE
No swimming for a few days it appears. But on that note, we are grateful that we are not being eaten alive by the cost of living here, this time putting $ in the pot instead. We seem to be a lot skinnier this round too, without the food donations by the big M/V Bleu de Nimes that was fattening us up last year. I think 2 whole months without refrigeration changed the way I cook as well! So, there you have it, I blogged something, now let's see if anyone reads it!