All at Sea

It has been a couple of relatively quiet days. No complaints from me; the steady and continuous touring around the island, socialising and somewhat muggy nights are taking their toll. As I lay in my (haunted) bedroom the other evening after a very impressive BBQ of rock lobster (aka crayfish), tuna and pork, I could still hear the wind blowing hard outside which didn’t sound good for the following afternoon's sea trip. But as it turned out, boat problems rather than weather put paid to anything maritime for another day. We instead took a drive to Jamestown and then on to 

a nearby local distillery. Yes, there is one here and it is (unsurprisingly) small, yet despite that they make a number of local products. I was given an informal tour before Emma went into the house to see the owner, a friend who is ill, and I walked the dog. 

So it wasn’t until Friday, my last full day, that I eventually clambered onto a boat to enjoy the island's seas. After two weeks here my hopes of seeing a whale shark were pretty low; it is towards the end of the season and on top of that, everything I have heard suggests there are fewer around this year. But when the captain briefed our expectant group, he told us that because we were having to head west instead of east, owing to weather, our chances of seeing whale sharks were reduced from about seventy five to forty percent. If he had been hoping to manage my expectations it hadn't worked.

We saw hundreds of dolphins - some particularly acrobatic. We saw various sea birds. And far off we saw the splash of what we were told was a marlin. But we didn’t see a whale shark. Nevertheless, the sun was hot and the sea was blue and it was just enjoyable being out on the water.

As we nosed past the most westerly headland for a glimpse of the coastline beyond, the wind we had been protected from hit us and the swell increased. It was then time to turn back, closer to the cliff shore to see Brown Noddy nesting sites and small caves and coves among the cliffs. We moored up in a small bay, Easter revellers chilling and barbecuing on the shore two hundred yards off while we jumped into the deep water and snorkelled around rocky outcrops looking for fish. One of the local contractors said she had seen turtles in this bay last time she was here. We found none today. But fish, large and small, colourful and dull, abounded.

We headed the last two miles to Jamestown, drying out in the hot sun and then, five hundred yards from the quay and swimming just beyond the line of the locals' small boats we saw one. I say saw, but unless you are in the water with a whale shark they are nothing more than a dark shadow just below the water. All you actually see is the thin, curved tail-fin trailing behind. But there it was and not for long. It was big but not as big as I had anticipated, a juvenile we were told and as a juvenile more cautious than the adults. So before any of us could think about getting into the water it slid gracefully away. 

Back on shore I had one last water based activity. One hundred yards from the Jamestown quay sits a red buoy and a dark something sticking out alongside it. That something is part of the steering mechanism of a ship called the Papanui and swimming out to see the wreck is a regular Jamestown activity. All I really knew about it was that at its deepest the wreck was in about twenty

feet of water but, swimming out with Emma and the dog, it was the size that surprised me with wreckage strewn along the seabed long before the marker buoy. In my mind I had had a vision of a medium sized pleasure boat but the wreckage that you swim over is actually that of a passenger liner. There is no recognisable complete structure but it is obvious that you are looking at a boat; plates, bits of the ribs, the skeletal remains of the stern and, most obvious, the boat's boilers lying together amid wreckage that must once have been an engine room. Even though nobody died on the boat it was still an eerie feeling looking down at the remains, floating in that border region between a world that I knew and in which I lived and this unknown, unseen world of decaying history lying just beyond my reach.