PIRATES, POLLUTION, and PITCAIRN
By Anna Cummins on May 02, 2011
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(Blog below by Stiv Wilson, currently at sea with 5 Gyres)
After completing our South Pacific Gyre sampling, and moving ahead of schedule, we decided to stop off at Pitcairn island. Pitcairn, population 44-60 residents (everyone you talk to says a different number) is best known for being home to the descendants of Flecther Christian, who took the H.M.S. Bounty in with mutiny, set off the captain and his loyalists in a rowboat with provisions and a sextant. Pitcarin is where Christian decided begin anew. Once at the island, the crew burned The Bounty just where we anchored and the remnants of her still lay on the bottom. All but about seven people on the island are descended from Fletcher, which makes for interesting group dynamics, to say the least. Not very many outsiders visit Pitcairn and thus, the locals were pretty curious about our crew.
We walked. After being on a ship for so many weeks, one's desire is to walk, and walk a lot. With my Chacos and a rough map, I set out to find the highest part of the island as well as check out some rocky coastline areas. In the trees we could pick guavas, oranges and bananas as for sustenance and refreshment as we walked. Strangely, we also came across a Galapogos Tortoise, that apparantly someone had stolen from there and set free here. On what's called Ted's Side (many of the island's locations are amusing-- things like cliffs named 'John Fell') we found a volcanic outcropping with a naturally protected pool to cool off in. We were hunting for shoreline that might show what plastic washes up there, but access to shore is very limited on Pitcairn and we didn't observe much of anything. A few piece of styrofoam were found, but other than that, not much. Pitcairn, unlike many of the other atolls and islands in the South Pacific appeared to be fairly plastic free, as flotsam would have a difficult time landing in a place that is almost entirely cliffed in.
On our way back to Sea Dragon, we stopped in at Pirate Pawl's for beers. Pirate Pawl is an interesting fellow, a tatooed and pierced swashbuckling type, but at his core, he's an environmentalist, concerned with the amount of plastic he's seen on the other atolls he's visited and its a affect on birds. He's a bit of birder, and he showed us 100s of pictures of pelagic birds that he'd taken.
Today, we're stopping on another atoll before Tahiti, looking to observe what sort of flotsam it has aggregated. Let's hope it's not much.
After completing our South Pacific Gyre sampling, and moving ahead of schedule, we decided to stop off at Pitcairn island. Pitcairn, population 44-60 residents (everyone you talk to says a different number) is best known for being home to the descendants of Flecther Christian, who took the H.M.S. Bounty in with mutiny, set off the captain and his loyalists in a rowboat with provisions and a sextant. Pitcarin is where Christian decided begin anew. Once at the island, the crew burned The Bounty just where we anchored and the remnants of her still lay on the bottom. All but about seven people on the island are descended from Fletcher, which makes for interesting group dynamics, to say the least. Not very many outsiders visit Pitcairn and thus, the locals were pretty curious about our crew.
We walked. After being on a ship for so many weeks, one's desire is to walk, and walk a lot. With my Chacos and a rough map, I set out to find the highest part of the island as well as check out some rocky coastline areas. In the trees we could pick guavas, oranges and bananas as for sustenance and refreshment as we walked. Strangely, we also came across a Galapogos Tortoise, that apparantly someone had stolen from there and set free here. On what's called Ted's Side (many of the island's locations are amusing-- things like cliffs named 'John Fell') we found a volcanic outcropping with a naturally protected pool to cool off in. We were hunting for shoreline that might show what plastic washes up there, but access to shore is very limited on Pitcairn and we didn't observe much of anything. A few piece of styrofoam were found, but other than that, not much. Pitcairn, unlike many of the other atolls and islands in the South Pacific appeared to be fairly plastic free, as flotsam would have a difficult time landing in a place that is almost entirely cliffed in.
On our way back to Sea Dragon, we stopped in at Pirate Pawl's for beers. Pirate Pawl is an interesting fellow, a tatooed and pierced swashbuckling type, but at his core, he's an environmentalist, concerned with the amount of plastic he's seen on the other atolls he's visited and its a affect on birds. He's a bit of birder, and he showed us 100s of pictures of pelagic birds that he'd taken.
Today, we're stopping on another atoll before Tahiti, looking to observe what sort of flotsam it has aggregated. Let's hope it's not much.
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