No home for these sailors

While the morning air filled with the crowing of roosters and the tolling of church bells, the full moon set across Apia Harbour and Van Diemen prepared to slip out to sea on Palm Sunday.

City dwellers may have lost more than they realise when the backyard chooks were boiled and fried into history in the name of municipal health. The rooster’s defiant crowing is reassuringly affirming. Ringing from every quarter as the dawn light infuses the tree-lined streets, the roosters say more than just: “Here I am”. They badge the new day and signals the presence of community, comforting and familiar. As we have sailed past green islets, to all appearances uninhabited, the sound of distant roosters crowing links us to other unseen people stirring in their villages in jungle hamlets behind the beaches. After four days in Samoa, we are leaving for Fanning Island, or Tabuaeran, as the 2500 people who now live there call it. The atoll lies about 1250 nautical miles north-north-east. On our final night, we ate at Sails restaurant, owned by expatriate Australian Ian Black, a Tasmanian adventurer and entrepreneur who, among other things, is an agent for the super yachts which visit. We met through Paul Goss, the skipper of the beautiful schooner Adix, formerly known as Jessica, desecrated under Alan Bond’s brief ownership when she was known as XXXX. Goss, also a former Tasmanian, was here aboard his own 20m yacht Tusitala, named for Robert Louis Stevenson, when we sailed in last week and he, our skipper Robbie Vaughan and I share many mutual mates in the pelagic milieu, including Pittwater’s Michael “Zappa” Bell. Tusitala is heading down to Fiji having sailed from Panama via the Galapagos and Tuamotos. Incredibly, she sailed on port tack (that is with the wind constantly on the one side of the boat) for nearly 3000 nautical miles, and logged 256 nautical miles on day alone. Robert Louis Stevenson still hovers over Apia, with the museum at his old home and his grave site (“Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill. ...”) near the botanical gardens popular spots for locals and visitors. Samoa needs visitors. The economy chugs along on tourism and fishing but if so many of the Samoans were not largely self-sufficient in their villages with their own coconut and taro plantations, pigs and fowl, they would be hard-pressed. As it is, the villages on the eastern side which were devastated by a tsunami some 18 months ago. The Rev. Ben Tapelu, the Anglican vicar of All Saints in Apia, who dined with us Saturday said 15 members of his wife’s family and 66 others from the same village were among the nearly 150 who were swept to their deaths. Incredibly, almost all has been rebuilt, including the highly regarded Tafua beach resort at Lalomanu village, which is run by the Anglicans. Tapelu spent 13 years on active service with the Royal NZ Infantry before being ordained six years ago and seems well suited to his island parish. Like many Samoans he is concerned by a threatened casino development. There was a poignant plea in the Samoan Observer last week from another pastor concerned that any casino-style development would attract paedophiles to these still amazingly innocent islands. Despite the now discredited Margaret Mead’s treatises on the love life of Polynesians, the Samoans exhibit a natural modesty and crime is not a major issue. Booze is not a huge problem, possibly because bars close at 10pm and liquor service stops in restaurants, though this seems to fairly flexible. A couple of reasons have been offered for the edict. One is that curtailing the opportunities for drunkenness has lessened the chances of road accidents. As the ratcheting back of drinking hours seems to have coincided with Samoans changing the side of the road on which they drive from right to left about four years ago, the reduction in the amount of alcohol partaken probably diminished the confusion. No-one, apart from the bar owners and hoteliers, is urging longer opening hours. And as we found with the Rev. Ben, a drink after 10pm didn’t seem to have that much effect on the vigour of his sermon.