A Kermadec bird and a Lionfish

Kermadec Petrel on Meyer Island photo by John Mac

Lionfish at Boat Cove, taken last Saturday

The Rat and Tui Brewery

My first brew is maturing in the brewery.

The process is fairly straightforward – you mix in the commercially prepared brewer’s mix, add the sugar and 23 litres of warmish water, tip in the yeast mixture and then wait for the bubbles to gloop their way to the surface as the yeast eats the sugar and makes alcohol. After about a week you clean up some bottles, tip a teaspoon of sugar into each one and pour the mixture in. Seal with a cap and wait at least another week (they recommend more) before refrigerating and imbibing.

Each new brew must have a name and date, which are inscribed on the brewery wall in felt tip pen. This little ritual provides a strange sort of history of the island – the ups and downs, the dramas, hopes and little victories. Some names commemorate the preoccupations of their time, as in the KZ series of brews which are terminated by the fatefully named Alinghi beer. Others range from the gloomy to the just plain zany:

The Devil Looks After His Own Draught
No Mail Ale
The Sentence is Nearly Over Pilsner
Al’s Pale Hole of Calcutta
Zymurgy Special
The Golden Tears of Allah

My lager is called "X Marks the Spot."

The Air Force delivers too

Recently we had a mail drop.

These are always exciting events and so the whole island (all 10 of us) usually gathers on the airstrip to see if the plane will get it right. Last year a pallet of ready mix concrete bags came down under a parachute and missed the entire strip; it lodged itself in the branches of a pohutukawa on the sea cliffs and had to be written off. This time we had quite a small package from an Orion, and they used a well-cushioned cardboard box with flaps open at the top like a propeller. In theory, it rotates and falls to the ground reasonably slowly.

The other exciting thing is that you never know what's going to be inside - have a look at this brief footage to see what we got!

Who's who on Raoul Island

The “Permanents”

Johnny B Johnny B is our Team Leader. He has a lengthy background in conservation as well as having run his own building company in Gisborne. Johnny B is an enthusiastic ornithologist and has been for as long as he can remember. It is to him we turn when we need to know which pukeko belongs to which clan, where their territory extends to or even whether they are male or female (two of the house pukekos, Lone Wolf and his partner, are apparently in a homosexual relationship).
All of the permanent team are contracted to DOC for a full 12 month stint. Like Gareth and Chauncy, Johnny has been here before as a volunteer.
This island seems to draw people back to it.

Dave Formerly employed by Toyota in Lower Hutt, Dave is responsible for all things mechanical on the island as well as our water supplies and the provision of electricity via our diesel generators. This is a pretty responsible position for a 22 year old, so occasionally he cuts loose when we have a party. His “shock the troops” trick is swallowing a live cockroach, but he only tends to do that when dressed in some sort of warrior garb. Actually, that’s pretty much every gathering so far. In keeping with Raoul tradition, Dave has not shaved or had a haircut since he arrived here and is sometimes referred to by Johnny B as “The Wookie.” He is the most experienced and dedicated poker player on the island and we recently had a big night of Texas Hold’em where Bas and I took him to the cleaners (twice) but he explained that he was just using this game to suss out our pattern of calls. He has an incredibly broad and eclectic selection of music and at any one time you can hear Johnny Cash, The Sex Pistols or Beethoven blaring out at full volume from his speakers in the workshop. Dave is the organiser of the weekly viewings of Deadwood on our DVD player.

Gareth Gareth is in charge of all things electrical on the island. He is from a military background, having served in Afghanistan and Bouganville and he is currently training hard for the shortest day “Hut to Hut” challenge for which you must visit all six of the island’s huts between sunrise and sunset. Last year he was back at the hostel by 12.30pm. Gareth is an excellent photographer and has set himself the task of shooting off 2000 frames a month while he is here. Most of these are of birds and he is steadily ticking off all the seabirds known to Raoul on his “done” list. There are quite a few. Not renowned for his early morning conversation with humans, Gareth nevertheless seems to commune effortlessly with the “pooks.” He has trained up Lone Wolf to collect daily rations of Nutrigrain from him as he eats breakfast on the verandah steps each morning and usually has a few affectionate things to say to the bird each day.

Chauncy Chauncy has to be the most non-judgemental person I have ever met. An expression he must use a thousand times a day is “that’s cool, you know.” He has an encyclopaediac knowledge of film and music, possibly as a result of his having watched every film that was ever made. Or so it seems to me anyway. He can list actors, directors and previous roles without even pausing to think. And did I mention his collection of 30,000 albums?
Chauncy is our plant specialist and is in charge of the weeding programme. As part of our routine in the field, we are supposed to continually call out in order to keep up with each other’s location in the bush. He is almost always somewhere above us – either on a near vertical slope or up a tree. He is incredibly nimble on steep ground and often seems to just skip over the windfalls that force us to crawl along on our bellies.

The “Vollies”

Bas A Dutchman, Bas came to us directly from Argentina where he had been living and doing some volunteer work. He saw the Raoul position advertised on the internet and doesn’t know NZ so well at all, so we are guiding him through the integration process carefully by making him watch the entire four seasons of Outrageous Fortune. Already he can “Kia ora, bro” with the best of us and is looking forward to getting to the mainland to meet all those other people like the West family. Bas is an ‘island nut’ and whooped for joy when the last of the interlopers left on the Braveheart. He has visited all sorts of islands, large and small, since he quit his AI (that’s Artificial Intelligence, not the other) company. He also has a Master’s degree in Physics so can be relied upon to enliven our dinner conversation with an erudite exposition on the Theory of Relativity. Or any one of the 400 movies he brought with him, or the role of the Xylons in Battlestar Galactica.

Craig Craig is a sailmaker and boatbuilder and occasionally plots with Bas the type of boat they will build or buy together in order to do the round-the-world voyage. Craig lived for a long time in Germany and has sailed as crew in ocean racers, including the one they inadvertently beached and had to abandon on the Brazilian coastline. Bye-bye ten million dollars! Craig is distantly related to Gaye, a fact that revealed itself when Gaye’s mum Val was in hospital in Nelson recently. He has done a couple of seasons as warden on the Heaphy Track and cannot go anywhere here without compulsively sweeping nikau palms off the track as you walk with him. To his eternal credit, he has never taken out a loan in his life and doesn’t trust banks.

John Mac A resident of Cambridge, John is here courtesy of his long-service leave provisions (yay, the government!) Another ardent conservationist, he can be relied upon to identify any plant that puzzles you and give you the full botanical name too. If the walking is uphill, and it all is, he can usually be seen disappearing up ahead in the distance. He entertained us all with the story of a camping group that included teenage girls who kept leaving lipstick kiss marks on the bathroom mirrors. Nothing could persuade them to stop this practice, so in despair the cleaner called everyone into the bathroom, seized a mop and dipped it into the toilet bowl. Scrubbing fiercely at the red lip marks on the mirror’s surface with the murky water, he turned to the girls and said “Look. I want you to stop kissing this glass because it’s just too difficult for me to remove the marks.”

Gina The machine. Gina is an engineer, based in Wellington. For a while she was queen of the island, but now she regularly has to be reined (sorry, bad pun) in by us blokes because she will charge headlong through any activity and then finish the day’s work with a run and a swim in the sea. It makes you tired just thinking about it. If there is a piece of ground that looks too steep we will usually confer about whether or not we should get out the rope, and then just follow her down because she has shot off and done it while we were busy deciding. Formerly a team cyclist in Europe, Gina brought a mountainbike with her and often zips around on the tracks with it. Last week I realised not only had I met Gina before, but she has been away kayaking with us when she was about 14. Since then she has many adventures like climbing Mt Cook or descending the 600 feet into Harwood’s Hole and having to free up the belay device part way down when it jammed on her hair. Gina’s definitive quote when offered assistance by Gaye for her ankle, hurt while running: “Pain doesn’t matter.”

Olympus Mju 1030 waterproof to 10m! Yeah, right.

On Saturday the sea was so smooth and inviting that we launched the two inflatables and went off to the Meyer islands on a snorkelling expedition.
It was good to get out on the water again, although the water temperature seems to have dropped a little in the last few days. Visibility was stunning. We found ourselves accompanied by some large skinny kingfish and a few kahawai but my general impression was of a rather impoverished submarine environment: there was no hint of the huge spectrum of colour and form that you would expect to see in tropical waters or even in NZ with its colourful kelp and seaweed. The range of fish was also diminished with no sharks at all encountered this trip.

Big casualty of the day was my camera, which let in water to the battery compartment and shut itself down. Probably forever. Here is one of its last recorded images – Bas snorkelling above me.The dead camera joins many other items of electrical equipment that struggle here with the humidity and heat. I have now taken to storing my other electrical bits and pieces in dry bags with sachets of silica packed away with them, in an effort to reduce the rate of attrition.

Happy Birthday Ma’am

As we are almost certainly living on one of the furthest-flung corners of Her Majesty’s vast dominions, we decided to celebrate her birthday with a formal dinner. Coincidentally it was also Gina’s 27th birthday on the same day so we went for the double whammy. Imaginations ran wild with the royal theme, as you can see from the photos. This probably reflects NZ’s increasingly cosmopolitan heritage, although I was a little offended that my attempt at formal attire resulted in persistent enquiries about any good real estate deals or used cars I might be able to put people onto.

In another example of the six degrees of separation that connects us all, we realised this week that Gina is actually Franz’s daughter. Franz was a good friend and outdoor companion of Neil S. and Shona; I met him on a number of occasions in the mountains and out kayaking. I remember him for his determination to make his seakayak and his river boat himself. Tragically he died in an accident in Alaska some years ago.

Roast lamb was on the menu last night, followed by fruit salad and a chocolate cake the size of a cannonball. There were a few rousing toasts to the health of the queen (and Gina) and a good time was had by all.

The left-foot jandal conundrum

We get a lot of jetsam washing up on our beaches here. There are a heck of a lot of fishing buoys, too many plastic bottles and a surprising number of left-foot jandals.

Why left-foot jandals? It’s hard to provide a definitive answer to that question, but one has been suggested after a lot of careful thought and analysis. It goes like this:

At any one time, the Pacific Ocean has a lot of people making that critical step out of the water and into a dinghy. Most will be goofy footers (ie they lead off with the right foot. Take a look at a snowboard hire shop near you and you’ll see by the binding configuration that “naturals” or left foot leaders, are in a minority)

A good proportion of these dinghy boarders will have had a drink or two but they have enough nous to clamp their right toes down onto the jandal as they make their first critical move. However, once committed they realise that their weight must continue the boarding process or they are going to get mighty wet. So they lunge forward, forgetting to lock down the toes on their left foot as it drags out of the water behind them.

Off comes the jandal, it floats out over the water to end up sometime later on our beach.