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Papua New Guinea,
December 2007
At the end of November, we gathered again in Alotau to
pick up friends and colleagues Gigi Coyle, Cynthia Jurs and Board Member
Hugh Wheir and headed north for our first week where we anchored off the island of
Fergusson. We had promised
to return there and spend 3 days enjoying a "cultural exchange"
with friends we had made during the canoe festival. It was a meeting that we
will never forget!
 Our
first greeting was a reenactment of what it would have been like to have
been explorers arriving a hostile land of head-hunters! Shortly
after our surprise, laughter and hand-shaking amongst us all gave way to days of
learning about life on Fergusson Island. They demonstrated how they make
fire, cook, exchange Kula, and sail using the traditional Kula
sailboats. Interspersed with this we exchanged food and songs and joined
them in games. Including a moment when it was a "free for all" for
throwing friends in the water - Heather was first in!
 Together we held a beautiful ceremony led by Cynthia
to bury a Tibetan Earth Treasure Vase at sea that was gifted to her by a
Tibetan Lama in honor of ocean conservation and preservation. The vase
was crafted, according to an ancient Buddhist tradition, for the purpose
of bringing protection and healing to the Earth. Since its arrival into
our care in October 2003, we have gathered periodically with people from
remote islands of the South Pacific and Southeast
Asia
to honor the intention of the vase with blessings and offerings.
 We opened the vase for its
final ceremony in the magnificent setting of
Fergusson
Island,
in a dawn-lit circle aboard Infinity.
Friends from the island who had enthralled
us for the few days previous with a magnificent display of sailing
canoes and Kula traditions joined us for this final gathering.
We set sail an hour later for Egum Atoll
which we had visited in 2003, a remote atoll of the Trobriand Islands with a vertical reef wall on its
outside.
Dolphins gathered at the surface, close to
the narrow entrance into the lagoon, while grey reef sharks patrolled
the wall below.
In keeping with the Buddhist tradition, we
brought the vase underwater for the first and last time, and found a
small cave along the wall in which to "bury" the Treasure Vase.
It is the only vase known to have been
gifted from the Himalaya Mountains
and buried in the ocean.
View a mini-film
and see where the vase was buried!
Uratu Island and Infinity
 From Egum, we moved on to
Kitava
Island, just east of Kiriwina, one of
the most famous Trobriand Islands.
We had studied the reef around the small
island
of Uratu in 2003
and found it then to be overall in a poor state of health, with large
amounts of algal overgrowth affecting the living coral colonies.
However, closer to the shore lay massive
Porites spp. colonies in
almost perfect condition, creating a reef of contradictions.
We returned in the hopes that perhaps it had
made a recovery to a more dynamic ecosystem but found in fact that very
little had changed.
The overall threat factor was almost exactly
the same (57% in 2003 compared to 60% in 2007) and again, the dominant
cause was algal overgrowth (46% in 2003 compared to 50% in 2007).
But the massive
Porites spp. colonies still
stood their ground in the shallows, almost unblemished.
Please view the Kitava coral reef study
results.
 We fought against strong
currents to repeat our transects from 2003 and found that the patterns
of water movement around Uratu have changed in the last four years.
There is new growth of
Acropora and
Pocillopora spp. colonies but
the battle against algal overgrowth remains.
This reef suffers from several detrimental
factors including the nearby international shipping lane, overfishing in
the past and a tsunami in the 1990s.
Like many of our study sites, this reef has
not overcome these factors and so continues to struggle on.
 We then sailed Infinity to
Gizo, Solomon Islands, where the crew will be conducting their fourth
repeat coral reef study carried out over the past eight years, and
report on the impact of the Tsunami that struck that reef last year.
The program at sea is in full expression and
in February the ship will depart Solomon Islands for Southeast Asia!
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