Too often I read the cruising guide or magazine article about a wonderful place after we've passed it. But this time I'd read ahead about a spot that one guide book called Isabel province's "diamond tiara," and made sure we got there.



We were headed for the Arnavons, a collection of 5 small South Pacific post-card quality islands that barely show up on the chart between the 2 large long skinny islands that flank them, Isabel and Choiseul. To get there we did a slow overnighter from the north end of Marovo Lagoon (which James Michener described as the Eighth Wonder of the World). We took the trip slow and overnight because the Arnavons were just a little too far to make it in a day with enough light left to eyeball the reefs on the way in, and if we went too fast overnight we'd arrive before daylight, with the same problem. There wasn't a breath of wind all night so we just putzed along at a leisurely flat 4 knots, both of us getting plenty of sleep. Jim quietly landed a small tuna right after daylight while I was still clinging to my last Z. He was also warily watching a bodacious squall off to the west and managed to snap it just spawning a waterspout.






This little group of 5 uninhabited islands is actually called the Arnavon Community Marine Conservation Area, a marine protected area established about 15 years ago to protect, among other things, the world's endangered supply of hawksbill turtles. This small area alone has one of the world's largest hawksbill nesting beaches.



The "community" in the name is a critical piece: ownership of the islands was long squabbled over (like most land here, it would seem...) and when The Nature Conservancy first tried to set up a ranger station, one of the "land owners" burned it down. Eventually the 3 communities that claimed ownership, from the two large neighboring islands, agreed to the protection plan and teamed up with the government and TNC to help the turtles out and keep the poachers out. The communities select guys to serve as the rangers, who are then trained to patrol the islands, protect the reefs, monitor turtle activity, and entertain the occasional visitors like us.

On patrol, the rangers are looking for stuff worthy of an exotic scavenger hunt: croc tracks, poachers, megapode birds (they look like scrawny black chickens), megapode eggs (they're huge coming from such a skinny bird), turtle tracks, turtle eggs, and a bunch of different kinds of birds (including the brilliant and noisy cardinal lorikeet). For the hawksbill turtles in particular, they keep detailed tallies of tracks seen, number of eggs laid, number of babies hatched, who the mother was if she's already been tagged, and if she hasn't been, they issue her an ID for the future.


The rangers gave us these megapode eggs when we arrived.
The birds bury them about 3 ft deep in the sand. Check out the size of the yolks (in the gallery)!

We spent more than a week in the Arnavons, following the rangers around -- Lionel, Dickson, and Reeves -- watching turtles hatch, snorkeling in gin-clear water, and showing movies on Asylum. They loved Indiana Jones with chocolate cake. The guys lead a pretty spartan life while on duty for a month, mostly eating rice, noodles, megapode eggs, and fish they catch. They're not allowed to have a garden (which everyone in the Solomons has) to avoid introducing any foreign plant species to the island. So chocolate cake and a couple of other things I baked for movie nights were real novelties. They'd run out of propane while we were there so were boiling water for rice, noodles, and tea over a wood fire. We donated gas for their generator and Jim cleaned and re-gapped the sparkplugs on their temperamental outboard to help them out.


Setting out on patrol with Lionel and Dickson (at the helm)



On patrol on the nesting beach



Jim and Dickson pleased to have found no poachers



Jim and Dickson even more pleased to have landed a fine fish


One night we did the 8 p.m. patrol of the nesting beach with them, walking 1.25 km along the beach and back looking for tracks or actual nesting turtles. The night was beautiful but we didn't see anything until almost back at the starting point where Dickson spotted tracks from the water and then the turtle herself! For the next hour we watched her methodically dig a deep hole (about 18") with her hind flippers, Dickson helping her dig to move the process along, and then wriggle into position to drop her eggs in the hole: 120 soft white ping pong balls.



It was an extraordinary scene, even when it started raining. Mama had selected a spot for her hole right at the edge of the erosion beach so after she was finished, the guys tagged her, shooed her back in the water, dug a new hole on higher ground, and moved, counted and reburied the eggs.

We also watched hundreds of tiny turtles crawl out from their sandy nests. The incubation period is 60 days, so the rangers know exactly when a nest is ready to hatch, and we were able to see four sets of babies emerge. The mothers lay as many as 200+ eggs, about 75% of which live to become tiny turtles. Unfortunately, once they reach the sea, their chances of survival plunge in the water. At that point, the estimate is that about 1% survive. This awful statistic, of course, broke my heart, as these darling little creatures wriggled their way up hills, down cliffs, over rocks and branches on the beach, got tossed around in the surf, relentlessly heading to sea. On one hatching day there were several small sharks lurking in the water just off shore, waiting for the charge of tiny babies. Young ranger Reeves threw rocks to try to drive them away, but chances are, few of that crop of babies survived. Enough words about this. Check out the photos below (and there are more in the gallery).














This was a very hard place to leave...