Written Sunday 24th January: Another day at the office

Sometimes, if the weather is nice and we have all been very well behaved, Pete lets us go on a day trip to some of the other islands in the French Frigate Shoals. So it was one sunny day in January when we experienced our first Boat Day.

Boat day begins with the launching of the boats. Although all four of us could fit comfortably in one of the boats we always take two, so that one boat can come to the rescue of the other boat if it happens to break down. If they both break down then I guess we would all just drift to a watery grave in the Pacific, but best not to think about that. (Actually this is not true. Both boats are equipped with EPIRBS, Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons, so in an emergency we would weigh anchor, set off the EPIRBS and wait for the coastguard to show up. We're a long way from the coast of course, but best not to think about that). The boats are launched using an electric hoist attached to a revolving crane arm contraption. There is the Safeboat (Safeboat company motto 'For God, country and fast boats'), a six metre orange RIB and the Boston whaler, a smaller flat-bottomed fibreglass boat. Pete and Melinda have the required boat handling qualifications, so they get to be the captains, with me and Sarah acting as crew. After a brief interlude during which the boats were launched, found to be not working properly, un-launched, fixed and then re-launched, we were off, zipping across water that was a shade of blue guaranteed to make all you folks back home immediately want to pack in your jobs and move to a beach hut in the tropics.


Launching the whaler.


And the Safeboat.

Our first destination was Trig Island, about a mile east of Tern. Trig is much smaller than Tern and made entirely out of sand, with no vegetation on it at all. It is essentially a glorified sandbar, and so low lying that it sometimes gets completely inundated by the sea. Despite this, a bunch of albatrosses choose to hang out there and one of our tasks for the day was to count the number of breeding pairs on the island.

Trig is reached after negotiating a tricky narrow channel in the reef surrounding it. There are no moorings at any of the other islands, so securing the boats involves dropping one anchor from the bow, reversing towards the beach and then at an appropriate moment the captain shouts "Go!" and the crew member leaps out into the sea (sometimes up to their neck) and drags another anchor through the surf and up onto the beach. It all feels very adventurous and exciting in a 19th-century pirate kind of way, plus you get to go to work in a bikini, and there are not many jobs where you can do that, at least not more than once.


Advance landing party.


Finding a parking space is not a problem.


Nesting albatrosses on Trig.

There were about 200 albatrosses nesting on Trig, so it did not take long to count them. After that we walked around the island picking up trash. Despite its remoteness an enormous amount of trash washes up at the French Frigate Shoals. The majority of it is old fishing gear- ropes, nets, floats and so on, and a huge variety of glass and plastic bottles. Other items include cigarette lighters, plastic toys, flipflops, lightbulbs, combs, bits of pipe and countless other unidentifiable pieces of plastic that have been polished smooth by the ocean. Floating plastic can cause problems for albatrosses- some species of fish attach their eggs to floating debris, including plastic. The albatrosses eat the eggs and plastic together, then regurgitate them for their chicks. Sometimes a chick's digestive tract will become so clogged with bits of plastic that it will die. We did not have time to clear up all the trash on Trig, so today we only collected stuff which might be dangerous to the wildlife- nets, ropes and bits of old lobster traps, which creatures can get tangled in. Then we loaded our trash into the boats, did the anchor thing again in reverse, and set off for our next destination, The Gins.


Some Laysan albatrosses being cute.


A selection of trash that washed ashore.


This masked booby found a use for one piece of trash.

Gin Island and its neighbour Little Gin Island are also small sand islands, about six miles south-east of Tern. On the way to them we drove past Round Island, which I was excited to see since I did all my PhD fieldwork on another Round Island in the Indian Ocean. Round Island, French Frigate Shoals is truly tiny- a sandy pimple about 10 metres in diameter. Too small even for albatrosses, the only life on Round Island was a solitary seal, basking in glorious isolation.

The Gins are the quintessential desert islands- nothing but brilliant white slivers of sand wedged in between the endless blue sea and sky. The noonday sun reflecting off the sand rendered them tremendously hot, and the overall impression was that of being trapped inside a giant tanning booth. It's hard to believe that any creature can survive in this environment, but a few albatrosses do nest here, and so we counted them.


The Gins.


Piratical bottles on the Gins.


Albatrosses love to sunbathe.


Exploring the island.


Another piece of flotsam.

After the Gins we moved on to East Island, one of the larger, taller and more vegetated islands in the atoll. East used to be the main inhabited island back when the US Navy occupied French Frigate Shoals, and when they left they neglected too tidy up. Consequently there is a lot of debris lying around- piles of old bricks, lumps of concrete, rusty bits of machinery and a single enormously tall telegraph pole which now has some of our satellite dishes attached to it. The pole also supports TurtleCam, a 24-hour live action video feed which is used to remotely monitor turtle breeding activity. It's a bit like Big Brother for turtles, except the turtles are just going about their turtley business and are not a bunch of preening dimwits for whom no act of self abasement is too low in the desperate struggle for a few nanoseconds of fame. But I digress.

Like the other islands, East is littered with trash that has washed ashore. But sometimes in amongst all the garbage you find a treasure- glass fishing floats. These are hollow spheres of glass which look a bit like crystal balls and range in size from golf balls up to beach balls. Although still in use today most fishing operations have phased out glass floats and those that are found washed up may have been wandering the ocean for decades, or even hundreds of years.


Abandoned machinery on East Island.

The eye in the sky.

Black-footed albatrosses throwing some shapes.

Masked boobies hanging out.

A Laysan albatross checks us out.

This is a rare Laysan/black-foot hybrid we spotted on East.

There be treasure on East- glass fishing floats.


This glass float was about the size of a basketball.

On the way back to Tern we took a small detour past La Perouse pinnacle, a 120ft high volcanic rock that sticks up on the western side of the atoll. La Perouse is precipitous, its vertical cliffs rising directly out of the sea, so it is impossible to land there. It is about the size and shape of a large cruise liner and is somewhat beyond the protective shelter of the reef, so on this particular day a big swell was rolling in from the Pacific and smashing against the rock, sending massive plumes of spray catapulting into the air. An awesome sight, but we decided not to get too close in our tiny boats. Being extremely brave and daring, I still managed to pose at the front of the boat for a photo, which was absolutely, positively not taken on a different day:

The author braves the tempestuous Pacific Ocean.