Thursday 30th July 2015
So what happens on
a DoomDay??
00 degrees 52.969S
131 degrees 14.195E
Pula Doom
14.7m
This is a lovely
anchorage, at Pulau Doom, off Sorong (mainland Papua.) Not to be compared with the marvelous islands
of Raja Ampat, but calm, pleasant convenient.
All was quiet and
peaceful on 2XS until about 11am, when I decided to go for a swim. Just the required 26 laps around the boat
(1000m). The tide was turning and the
current was strong; I didn’t really want to go along the coast and find myself
being towed back behind an outrigger canoe… The swim around and around the
boat, this way and that, was actually quite challenging and I had to
concentrate on not getting swept away – good exercise, which was the point of
the…well the point of the exercise…
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| We are an ever-fascinating spectacle to our boys... |
When I was about
halfway through my circuits I saw black shapes in the water, around the
ladder…aha! Our naughty children had
arrived! Just Eco, and a few of the
smaller cuter ones…By the time I had exhausted myself sufficiently and had clambered
back on board, all five of them were busy as could be. Scrubbing away at the deck. Some had found buckets and sponges and those
green scotch-brite type things. Eco had
the big scrubbing broom, twice the size of him.
I was so impressed with their industry that I decided to make pikelets rather than (not very yummy) popcorn. These went down extremely well and I ended up feeding about 25 very hungry big and small children.
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| Eco being scrubbed down in turn |
They are just gorgeous, so cheeky, funny, full of life. Very loving and polite EXCEPT when it comes to food! I had to hold the pikelet plate close to my chest and make sure they only took one at a time. It was a bit like feeding half-tame wolves, I imagine. Snatch, grab, push, shove, shriek.
I played some
music and ignored them all for a while, and then I went out and cut up my
shallots and garlic in preparation for dinner.
The shallots are delicious but very small and fiddly; it is nice to have
company while I am doing this task. Once
again, however, I ended up with a whole production line of willing
workers. Do they line up to help their
mothers peel and chop?? I have a teensy
inkling that…maybe not!
One of my boys was
very keen on chopping the garlic. I said
it had to be very very small (kechil) and he spent at least an hour reducing
five large cloves to fine shreds. But he
had competition and I had to get more knives.
It seemed like a wasted
opportunity, having all these keen kids on board, so I decided to give them a
small English lesson. They have a lot of
trouble saying what their name is. Well
no; they all say MY NAME IS Denis, or
Yusuf, or whatever, but they also point at their friends and say, My name is Janus, or Eco, or whatever. I just wanted to them to learn to say, “My
name is Mikhail; his name is Ishmail.”
And also to say How are you/very
well thank you. Not sure how well they
learned any of this but there were many screams of laughter so it was a good
lesson! We ended up singing If you’re happy and you know it clap your
hands, a resounding success. And
then I put on Don’t Worry, Be Happy, and
went back to my shallots.
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| Senior members of the invasion, Janus and his sister, Enrika |
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