Checking into the port of Lata on the island of Nando, Solomon Islands was fairly well straight forward if not complete. Four Solomonese officials in plain clothes, arrived by longboat mid-morning, as scheduled by email. As the Customs and Immigration Officers got into filling out their respective official forms, the Bio-security agent shyly whispered to me that she had forgotten to bring along her official form. I offered to download and print it off on our ship’s printer, but she waved it off and just asked for verbal confirmation that we weren’t smuggling live animals or plants. I gave her my best “We’re not smuggling anything face", glad that we had dispatched the coconut crabs the day before. She advised that we would need to clear Biosecurity at the next port since she had forgotten her paperwork. I heard Elmo mutter under his breath, “You had one job”, I kicked him under the table, hoping the officers didn't notice. In her defense, November Rain was only the 12th boat to visit Lata this year, so maybe she was a bit rusty with her job duties.
While Garry was occupied with the paperwork, one of the inspectors snooped around, opening lockers, hatches, and drawers, but overall, just having a cursory look. The bottles of beer and wine on board were counted up, the total volume tallied up on the back of his hand in a ballpoint pen, verifying our import declaration. Fortunately, we had been forewarned on a cruiser’s blog about the attention to detail with alcohol, and how any discrepancy would incur a fine (in the form of a couple of bottles of wine). The Inspector looked a bit disappointed in our accurate reporting but soon moved on to stamping the permits. The officers told us to pay any fees at the next port of call, as Lata itself did not have a bank, nor an ATM and they could not accept money.
After the formalities, our two crewmen, Victor and Elmo, took a recon to shore and were gone for hours, hiking into the township, returning with blisters on their feet and a good buzz from the local bottle shop. Their reports of the town convinced Garry and me that we needed to see it for ourselves, but skip the long hike by taking the dinghy most of the way.
The next morning, Garry and I planed the dinghy a couple of clicks across the large bay into town. A small cove next to the wharf was lined with half a dozen small boats, suggesting it was a good place to park the tender. Broken coral, rotten vegetation, and rubbish impacted into the sand made it difficult for Garry and I to haul the dinghy up to the high water line but four local men jumped down off the rocks and pitched in without asking.
The crumbling concrete wharf was occupied on one side by a derelict half-sunken tuna boat, the M/V Tremax, decaying and leaking oil for the past decade. Five or six anglers, both men and women, using thin hand lines, were jagging small fish with tiny hooks, a merged pile of small fish growing between them, some still flopping around in the hot sun.
The beach-side fresh market consists of four lop-legged wooden tables, huddled together under the canopy of a large shade tree. The predominate crop was betel nut, presented in piles of two to four fruits, each pile the same price, with the size of the pile determined by the quality of the product. The only other produce available were bananas, coconuts, and a few green beans. The supply of green beans was so limited, that each pile consisted of only two or three beans each. The scarcity of produce at the marketplace was a far cry from the bountiful fresh markets of Luganville and Port Vila. It was a bit worrisome, as I had expected to be able to resupply while in the Solomons, but it wasn’t looking hopeful, given Lata was the largest town in the region.
Across from the market, a large sign spell out in pictograms the local fishing regulations, indicating that while crocodiles, turtles, and dolphins were legal to consume, they couldn’t be sold commercially. Only dugongs and leatherback turtles were completely prohibited from consumption. We didn’t see any actual fish for sale.
As we were walking along the dirt track that was the main road, Garry pointed out a bright red patch of fluid in the road, commenting that an animal must have been recently injured. To his horror, I explained it was betel juice saliva. Betel nut consumption is epidemic, we’ve got to meet a single villager over the age of 12 without the tell-tale brownish-red varnished teeth. A 2014 report determined that 81% of adults and 68% of school-age kids in the Solomon Islands were betel nut users, with the average cost of using at $SI 338/week or $NZD 67/week per user, (adjusted for today’s dollars, $NZD 88/week). It’s a strong part of the culture and a widely accepted practice.
We checked out a couple of the dry goods shops, finding the usual supplies of canned mackerel, bully beef, and low-grade cooking oil, the ubiquitous staples of the South Pacific. As a point of comparison shopping, one can of Fanta in the mini-fridge was going for SI$10, equivalent to 2 NZD, actually cheaper than a New Zealand servo, a good value, considering it had to come by cargo ship.
Diesel fuel was available, but only in jerry-can quantity and of questionable quality and we didn’t bother getting a price on it. The town’s lone taxi, a late-model blue sedan, canvassed slowly up and down the empty road, a blue flag hanging limply on the antenna, an unilluminated taxi sign on the roof announcing its availability to no one on the street.
We couldn’t help but notice every grass shack, mud hut, tin shanty, or cinder-block building was fortressed by rusty chainlink fencing with barbed wire reinforcements. Whether the risk of theft was real or perceived, we weren’t entirely sure, and we were even more clueless about what was worth pinching. One thing was for sure, a steelman had made a killing a few years ago on selling chainlink to everyone in town.
We were starting to get a bit nervous about leaving the dinghy unattended on the beach, so we headed back to the beach and rooster-tailed it back to November Rain, to work out our next move. The weather was flat and calm, not a ripple in the bay and it was stinking hot. There wasn’t any place enticing to swim or snorkel nearby. Garry took it as a sign to move on, he was itching to go fishing anyway.
Outside the bay, the wind was howling and the water was standing up. Elmo had a go with some popper fishing along a reef that mirrored the shoreline but nothing followed and after 10 minutes, we moved on. As we headed around the point, there was a marlin strike on a lure and two hits on the Rapala, but zero hook-ups. It was too rough to circle back so Garry decided to hole up in a large lagoon, sheltering from the winds for the next couple of days. The lagoon was on the southern side of the island and once the winds buttoned off, the plan was to head north to the Reef Islands, about 35 miles away.
The nautical charts for the area were rudimentary and incomplete, simple outlines of land masses, with a few splotches of green, signifying the more prominent shoals. The charts failed to record depth sounding so Garry had to rely on old-timey navigation techniques such as reading the watercolor and avoiding breaking waves while consulting Google Earth images, downloaded from StarLink. He picked out a promising approach on Google Earth and inched our way into the lagoon.
It wasn’t but a few minutes after we dropped anchor that we had several dugouts at the back of the boat, filled mostly with children between the ages of 5 and 15, excited to see the circus had come to town. We donated the second-hand clothes we had brought but realized we needed Amazon to start airdropping a resupply. After we ran out of gifts, we started raiding our food supplies for the remaining villagers who missed out on tee shirts. The canoes hung around til well after dark, and it was getting a little annoying when they wouldn’t leave. Victor said, “I now understand what zoo animals feel like.”
The canoes continued to reappear at dawn and loiter around until after dark over the next couple of days. A couple of the more daring villagers boarded our boat in their persistence to trade, giving me a bit of a scare. We kept telling them we had nothing left, that we had already given everything away to the previous villagers, but that did little to dissuade them. One guy set up to fish off our duckboard, as our boat was acting as a FAD for some small fish. Garry joined him on the back deck with the Sebeki rod as a show of goodwill but got nothing. We spent a good part of the day hiding out inside the sweltering cabin, to avoid the constant barrage of “Hello madam, hello sir’.
Desperate to escape the fishbowl, and starting to feel a bit exposed, we decided to brave the rough seas and go fishing, making our way over to another island, where we hoped we might have fewer visitors. After consulting the forecasts for the wind direction, Garry canceled heading north to the Reef Islands, instead, heading south to the Santa Cruz Islands. The seas were pretty sloppy but the fishing made up for it, five blue marlin caught from six hits, including a double hook up for myself and Victor.
There was some confusion about the double hook-up that led to a comedy of errors. Elmo was our designated wire man and Victor didn’t realize a second rod had gone off until Garry sprinted down from the flybridge and grabbed the rod out of the holder. Victor, now behind the 8 ball, struggled to put on his fighting harness, while Garry and I and untangled our crossed lines, doing the November Rain shuffle over and under, untying the potential macrame of line. My fish had grey-hounded off into the yonder, stripping off 800 meters of line. Victor’s fish was doing massive acrobatic flip-flops, right towards the boat. It was a small fish, maybe 50 kg, but looked as if it was going to flip into the boat any minute and take me out with it. I was trapped on the platform with a lot of weight on my line, not able to move. Fortunately, it calmed down before doing any damage, and Garry nominated Victor’s fish as the first to the boat. Mine took a bit longer with so much gone. Elmo wired both fish, and we marked off the first double of the trip.
Elmo took a turn on the rod and had a lively blue pulled in a little too quickly. I wired the small guy and Garry stepped in to take over on the leader, as it was a bit too green for me. Victor took a turn on the leader for the next marlin and wired his first blue. All the fish were small, members of the kindergarten club, all around 50 kgs or less.
Garry had scouted a sea mount that rose to 40 meters from a depth of 400. He worked the area for an hour with a combo of lures and Rapalas. Pickings were slim, we caught only a rainbow runner, a small skipjack, a small Spanish Mack, and one small shark. All in all, though, despite the rough weather, it was a good day, given the five marlin earlier.
That afternoon, we anchored inside the reef of Utopia, one of the Santa Cruz Islands. Our arrival was met by the sounds of laughing children and happy villagers racing each other out in canoes, excited to see us and discover what treasures we brought them. The crew handed off the two bait fish, and Elmo queried the growing audience, “Who speaks English?” Several fingers pointed to a young girl, maybe about 16 years old, as she simultaneously raised her hand, offering a shy “Hello”, while flashing a rare white smile, in sharp contrast to the ruby red lips and reddish-brown teeth on the elderly woman in the flotilla.
Elmo and Victor tried to negotiate a cease-fire, the terms; we would provide the villagers with 20 kgs of rice, but once it was parcelled out, they would have to agree to leave us alone. There were a few nods of agreement, and we got to breaking down the rice into smaller portions, each canoe getting a share. A couple of the villagers returned later, with some plantains and coconuts, in such large quantities that we declined more than we accepted, and after that, they left us in peace.
Unfortunately, the neighboring village did not get the message, we had to turn away a couple of late arrivals, including one family who wanted to trade eggs for roofing nails and light fishing line, neither of which we could supply. The man had brought his entire family, his wife, three children as well as extended family as if it was a Sunday afternoon sightseeing outing to the zoo. He identified himself as Christian and told us that we were only the second pleasure boat in five years to have parked in his bay. A supply ship would arrive every two or three months in the neighboring village, he explained, but it wasn’t often enough and they never brought building materials.
The next morning, we explored the waters inside the reef, Elmo casting poppers, but only a shark followed. With the way the weather was playing out, we completely ditched the idea of the Reef Islands. Garry’s new plan was to move over the neighboring atoll, Vanikoro, about 20 miles to the south, which on Google Earth, looked to have some promising reefs for snorkeling and lobster hunting. Our primary objective though, was to find an anchorage that was too remote for the villagers to seek us out.
En route, we had one hook-up, a lively blue marlin, a bit larger than what we had been catching in the past week, perhaps in the 80 kg range. It took a bit of line, but I had it to the boat in about 20 minutes. Elmo leader and before we got a good look at it, pulled the light gauge hooks for the long-distance release.
From the tower, Garry spotted a large school of tuna, boiling on the surface. He made several passes, but the fish couldn’t be enticed to take the lures. He positioned the boat right next to the boil-up and Elmo cast a few throws with a popper, snagging himself a small bonita. We moved on.
Not far from the tuna, Garry spotted a large log, acting as a FAD (fish aggregating device). There were heaps of small fish on it, and we had a chase from some mahi-mahi on the lures but no hookups. Victor and Elmo were keen to do an open-ocean dive and got kitted up with their spear gear. Within minutes, Elmo had speared a small mahi-mahi and immediately got into a dispute with a shark over ownership. The shark got a small bite of the belly, but not much more. Victor shot a rainbow runner and ended up losing all his earnings to the tax department.
The approach into Vanikoro’s atoll passage was well marked, and with Garry in the tower, on the lookout for coral heads, we anchored safely in calm waters with no villages in sight, keen to avoid being “canoed” again. Only one visitor approached that night, an elderly fisherman, who offered to return the following day with eggs if we wanted, but fresh vegetables might be a problem. He was most interested in the upcoming weather forecast, a common theme from all of the fishermen we met, along with requests for fishing lines and bait.
The next few days were spent moving around, and generally avoiding the canoes, although a few more modern boats with outboards approached, offering to sell us diesel in jerry cans and home-brewed beer. Garry donated a few game lures out of his “dog” box to one guy, who could use them with his 60 HP motor and his ocean-sturdy long boat. We asked for produce in return and he replied non-commiftedly that he would see what he could do. He returned an hour later with a few bananas and green coconuts, along with four beautifully made local handicrafts; and shell necklaces for us all. Garry was presented with a very special amulet, exclusively for the “Chief”, which he wore proudly for the next two days.
Garry and I had a snorkel over to the shore, and found the healthiest coral yet, while Victor returned from his swim with a Black Snapper on his spear. Elmo took some shots at popping along the reef and was rewarded with a couple of Red Bass and two identical large barracudas or maybe, is was the same one caught twice.
Victor was keen to dive the reefs around the atoll, but after researching on Google about the risk of saltwater crocodiles in the Solomon’s, he began to get very selective about his locations. He now queries everyone we meet, (in addition to his usual questions about the location of lobsters and liquor stores), about the presence of crocodiles. There were conflicting reports from the locals, from “Yes, very big ones” as well as, “Not here, but at another island”. We weren’t sure what to believe. Google tells us that there were 83 fatal crocodile attacks in the Solomon Islands from 2014 to 2019, although that number could be tripled, due to underreporting. Our anchorage, surrounded by mud, mangroves, and brackish water added up to a triple threat. I recalled how the coconut crabs had invaded my galley the previous week and locked the saloon door before bed that night.
We've been wrestling with our new stainless anchor chain, which has a talent for twisting itself into a knot. The fix is to lay the chain out on the ground to untwist but unfortunately, that won't be an option until we are in a marina, 6 weeks from now. In the meantime, the crew on the foredeck has to manually untwist any kinks during deployment, a risky job with the added thrill of potential finger loss. It's not a huge problem in shallow water, but deep water is a real bitch. Unfortunately, the water inside the atoll seems to have two depths, 1-meter reefs that drop off a cliff to a 35-meter bottom.
In the middle of the night, we dragged anchor, the strong winds pulling us 400 meters off the mud, despite being in the most sheltered bay of the atoll. Fortunately, Garry seemed to have a sixth sense of the anchor and woke up before we ended up in the mangroves. Elmo had to unknot the chain again and I set the anchor alarm on my phone app, shutting the barn door after the cows had escaped.
Did I mention, the weather has been shit, very windy with south-easterlies around the 20-25 knot range? The long-range forecast for the area wasn’t showing any signs of buttoning off, in fact, probably getting worse. It’s seriously impacted our ability to gamefish, so we’ve decided to pull the pin on the entire region. We started looking for a weather window to cross the 240 NM towards the Western Islands of the Solomon’s, where there appeared to be more places to hide.
After a couple of days of waiting, there was still to be no end in sight to the weather. We decided to bite the bullet and move on, with the weather on our port aft corner, with the wind at 20 knots, waves, and swells in agreement, pushing us towards San Cristobal Island.
That night, during the crossing, eleven flying fish and small one squid committed suicide by jumping onto the boat. The squid managed to make it all up to the flybridge, through the side curtain window, where it sprayed black ink all over the settee. There's a therory a seagull was in assistance of the crime. And while most of the flying fish landed on the foredeck, one sailed through my hatch and landed on the floor beside my bed. At the end of the day, I’ll take flying fish over coconut crabs in my cabin any day.
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