Six months worth of breakfast

I arrived in Honolulu on November 17th, but our boat to Tern Island does not leave until December 2nd, so in the mean time I am helping out with whatever jobs I can at the office. So far this has mainly involved shopping. Shopping on a grand scale however- six months worth of food is shipped out to Tern Island all in one go, so you need a fork-lift truck to pick it up rather than a shopping bag. On Friday I drove to a massive warehouse on the outskirts of Honolulu with two of the NW Hawaiian Islands support staff (Cindy and Maylanie) to pick up the first consignment (dried and canned goods). This vast, two-storey building was packed from floor to ceiling with bulk containers of food. It reminded me of the warehouse at the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', except instead of being filled with crates of mysterious ancient artifacts it was fillled with crates of apple pie filling and tinned chilli. Once our two pallets of food were loaded onto the truck and we had checked that everything was present and correct (72 tins of sweetcorn- check, 72 tins of carrots- check, 36 boxes of cereal- check), we drove back to the 'staging area'- Kapahulu bunkhouse, which is also where I am living at the moment. It then fell upon me to pack all the food into huge sturdy plastic containers (about 4'x4'x3') ready to be loaded onto the ship. As some of you may know, I am a little bit OCD when it comes to fitting lots of differently shaped boxes into one big box, so I spent a happy afternoon making sure that every last molecule of space in the containers was occupied. I filled two and a half containers and was rather pleased with the results- see below.

Everyone at USFWS has been very friendly and welcoming to me so far. On Saturday two of the guys from the office took me diving (I say 'guys from the office', but actually one of them is in charge of all the US Pacific Islands, covering some 57 million sq. km. of ocean). I'm not going to bang on about the diving for fear of sounding smug, but at one point a gigantic turtle got so close to me that I thought it was going to smack me in the face with its flipper. Oh, and there were spinner dolphins too. Sorry.