Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea
October/November, 2007

Michel Lippitsch in a Kula canoe with Infinity beyond

As people who live on the sea, we continuously seek encounters and exchanges with other island cultures.  For several years, we have known about the Milne Bay Canoe and Kundu Festival in Papua New Guinea where ancient arts of Pacific seamanship have been showcased to reignite an old maritime culture.  This year, we finally made it to the centre of the action.

The Milne Bay province covers the most eastern apex of the mainland and spreads into the Solomon Sea with its island groups to the north and east.  The region includes the Kula Ring, an ancient inter-island trading circle, made famous by an anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 20^th century but operating as an active culture for at least the last thousand years.  The province also happens to include some of the most spectacular coral reefs on the planet.  
 
Our task, assigned by the Festival’s genius Chairman, John Kaniku (photo to the left), was to rendez-vous a few days before the festival with the epois – the traditional kula canoes – and accompany them on their 80 nautical mile journey to Alotau.  We spent several days at Fergusson Island, getting to know the captains and crews, some of the traditions and taboos associated with these extraordinary vessels and observing the last-minute preparations for their participation in this festival. 

The epoi sails made from pandanus were laid out on the shoreline for reinforcement, paddles were soaked in the shallows, and masts inspected for strength.  The epois are paddled when there is not enough wind, but sailed whenever possible.  The merest breeze provides an impressive speed, as we all discovered when the epoi crews took us for a ride.

We returned to Alotau as the escort to these magnificent canoes.  Upon arrival, and over the next few days, the bay filled with sails of all shapes and sizes as all the canoe cultures of this region gathered like a living inventory of the sea cultures of this region of the Pacific - war canoes with 22 men paddling at fierce speed, coastal sailing canoes resembling ancient windsurfers, deep sea canoes heeling in the afternoon winds until their outriggers were almost vertical and the majestic epois displaying their unique style.  The festival has only been running for four years but has already attracted international attention, including a team of paddlers who traveled all the way from Hawaii in their shining white fibre glass Polynesian canoe.

The central market area, usually an empty area of grassland, was transformed into a small city of island cultures for the four days.  Canoes clustered on the narrow beaches.  Crews camped out behind them under tarps and by fire light.  Dance groups adorned traditional costume, dancing for the crowds in a central square.  As war canoes battled it out in the bay for first place in high speed races, crowds on the beach watched the competition through re-enactments of the traditional dances for send-off and return of the canoes.  A media booth stood in the middle of it all to house the radio, television and print journalists covering the events plus PCRF’s Studio of the Sea and Immersive Media camera teams with all their Pelican cases of equipment! 

The festival ended with a traditional pig and banana/yam exchange between island people that has been modernized by the addition of crates of corned beef and bags of rice.  A network has been created here at this gathering for the last four years with the intention of reviving tradition and meaning in cultures that were on the brink of losing it all.  We salute the spirit of this festival, the enormity of the task of coordinating canoe crews from remote islands with no communications, and the results already apparent in the pride with which the people of Milne Bay exchange their cultures.  Unlike other cultural shows in the country, this is a festival for the people, by the people.  

After our immersion into the canoe cultures, we took off to the Raven Channel area, well known underwater territory for us.  Here we began training recently arrived crew in science methodologies and coral identification while making observational dives at old haunts of ours – Magic Spot and the Lighthouse.  While the fish life was as sensational as when we first dived these sites in 2002, the reef substrate appeared to be suffering a little.  Sponges were bleaching as well as some hard corals and we also sighted several crown of thorns seastars as well as many coral colonies recently attacked by them. 

We anchored in Nuakata for a few days in its quiet northern bay but found ourselves dealing with the birth of Cyclone Guba on the 13^th November.  Although the South Pacific cyclone season officially begins on the 1^st November, cyclonic activity in ‘normal’ years does not  begin to manifest until well into December.  Dealing with 40 knot winds and 20 foot swells just after dawn and an anchor dragging Infinity towards the reefs in the bay corroborated our findings in the last ten years at sea that ‘normal’ does not exist any more in the world’s weather patterns.  Many islands in the Milne Bay region which officially lies outside the cyclone belt of the South Pacific are now seeking disaster relief from the provincial government with structures destroyed and crops ruined. 

In the coming days we will depart Alotau and sail to Kitava, one of the islands in the Kula Ring. There we will conduct a repeat study of the coral reefs, meet with old friends on the -island and sail mid-December to Solomon Islands.  The holiday season will be spent offshore as we celebrate together on Infinity and with friends at sea!