Palmerston Atoll
| After a pleasant enough 4 day sail from Bora Bora the Palmerston Atoll made its appearance on schedule on the horizon and as we closed land so we were contacted by Simon, our host for our time on Palmerston. It was an amazing experience: Palmerston Island is populated by the descendants of William Marsters who arrived here in 1777 (three years after Cook discovered the place), took 3 wives and got to work. Eddie and Simon Marsters were our hosts, taking us to and from shore each day (the pass through the reef was not do-able by dinghy), feeding us lunch and making sure we did not contact either of the other two families on the island; the three Masters offshoots do not get on well together despite the 70 or so of them sharing a 1 square-mile island. Whilst we were there we rode out a gale in the lee of the island, watched the quarterly supply ship fail to deliver the supplies that it should have loaded on Rarotonga and we made good friends with Bob Marsters and his family, one of the other families! Palmerston was incredible: the locals barely need to lift a finger to exist; they fish intensively for two weeks before each supply ship comes and buy their supplies with the proceeds. Their generator runs twice a day for a few hours to give them light, music and power to run a DVD player and a TV. There is one phone and one computer on the island, these are available sporadically for the locals. It was a totally unique experience for us. |
Date(s): August / September 2007. Album by Gerard Coulson. Photos by Gerard Coulson. 0 Total. 0 Visits. |
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