Monday, 9 August Monday wash day

This photo shows Edward Marsters, Taia Marsters (daughter of Bob), Stuart from Imagine and David.  We'd just walked all the way around the island.

There is a yacht club (unused) with a bar without beer, shower and laundry facilities which was built at the suggestion of the former Admiral of the Fleet at the time of the Falklands war when he sailed here on his yacht, Endeavour. He would have been eligible to fly a white ensign unlike us plebeians who can only fly red. Bill Marsters runs the yacht club and does yachties laundry for free in his two large washing machines. Today he's doing our sheets and towels and in exchange we've put together a goodie bag of tinned vegetables, a big bag of ginger biscuits, cigarette lighters, pencils for his school age children and a roll of tin foil. When we were at his house I saw washed and crumpled foil pegged on the washing line suggesting it gets re-used.

We arrived at Bill's place and our sheets and towels were hanging on the line dry and ready to go. He'd saved us 6 loads of our onboard machine which equals 300 litres of water and three hours of generator use and we were very pleased to give him our gifts. However, he then wanted to give us gifts! I estimate Palmerstone hosts make a net loss on every boat they host. Bill pressed us to take a loaf, 2 packs of parrot fish fillets that had been destined for sale in Rarotonga, potatoes. He offered eggs and onions too but we were able to persuade him bread, fish and potatoes were plenty. What wonderful people and what an honour to have been invited to share the life of this unique community.

Bob & family had been out fishing in the morning and then came back to clean and fillet the fish.  We helped by watching the whole family taking part in preparing their fish that would be deep frozen and sent on the next cargo boat to Rarotonga for sale to the hotels.  parrot is one of the sweetest fish to eat, but as a reef fish we'll never catch one from trawling off our boat. We;d need to go spearfishing.

This was our last evening in Palmerstone and as a fitting farewell a humpback whale surfaced at our stern and blew us a goodbye spout of water.