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Pete's Churchill Odyssey 2005

4th Nov 2005
Gone fishin' and found a re-photographer!

Friday, 4th November, 2005.
Today we’re goin’ fishin’ and we left the house at 6.50.
Betsy had put together a packed lunch which interestingly was not allowed to include bananas; ‘You never catch fish when there are bananas on board the boat – it’s a well known fact’.
On the way to Keahou Bay we stopped in to buy a box of doughnuts and some coffee for breakfast. Down at the boat yard, Betsy’s friend Pat was busy hosing down a launch, re-fuelling, oiling and generally making it ready to go to sea. He owns and runs the yard but alternates between hiring fishing boats and working in construction … today he was building and Jan was coming with us to skipper the boat.
Jan arrived complete with cast on her arm; she’s a ‘Cattle Roper’ which means that she ranches cattle and catches them on a rope. One of the ‘Roping’ occupational hazards is that sometimes your thumb gets caught in the rope, and off it comes! Having had a very minor ‘staving’ once or twice which was sore enough, I would imagine that this is excruciating.
Anyway, the occupational hazard happened and she apparently popped it into a bag with some ice and duly headed off to hospital in Honolulu (three quarters of an hours flight away) and with separated thumb in tow. The long and the short of it being that they ran out of time; there is a critical period during which you can re-attach and they missed it, so she is now undergoing a period of painful re-construction and hence the splint.
We headed south along the coast having set lines out the back with lures as big as milk bottles and 4” hooks towards Kealakekua Bay. Just off the bay one of the reels started screaming out but we were slightly too slow to set the hook and whatever it had been detached itself . We spent a bit of time in the area to see whether anything else felt like taking a bite and then headed out to sea towards a number of other boats who were working an area. Here was the tuna school and an attendant pod of Hawaiian Spinner dolphins working their way back and forwards. Took loads of pics as they crossed our wake, rode under the boat, and ran parallel to us. Quite a few youngsters in amongst some of them being nursed by their mothers.
We had lunch at see with the engine shut down and then headed back towards the island to be on the wharf at 2.
Quite a bit of washing down and flushing through of the boat to do and then we stopped in to the post office to ply yet more trade the way of the US postal service. The postmistress was a bit of a grumpy old bat who Anne felt the need to keep referring to as ‘This nice lady …’ which did seem to keep her slightly sedated at moments of high stress, such as when another customer came in … and worse when one came in and didn’t quite close the door. He got a really entertaining roasting for his trouble!
Betsy and I spent a bit of time doing short sprints between the post office and the grocery store to findf a suitable box … then it was a question of raiding the free newspaper stand for packing and the saga continued … but eventually Anne had her nuts packed away, Betsy had been sitting serenely out on the bench had arranged a house-warming party and the pressure was off.
We went down to Kailu Kona, armed with the Kona museum pamphlet and roughly scouted out some re-take locations. The shoreline has changed considerable but one old tree, photographed in its youth at the beginning of the twentieth century, still hangs in there on the sidewalk opposite the palace.
We retired to Lefty’s bar for a cocktail and snack supper while a parade took place on the street outside. The parade is the fifth annual coffee growers event and features lanterns and drumming and was attended by a good proportion of the town who lined the street to watch.
Betsy’s friend Bev joined us and I chatted to her over dinner. She’s a seasonal Park Ranger up at Wrangel St Elias which is the largest National Park in Alaska and spend the other half of the year in Hawaii. She has a evry inetresting (surprising even) view on the prospect of oil exploration up in Alaska which presumably reflects much local opinion – the view is that the area affected is so small that any effect is insignificant. In addition to this would be the communal gain from the investment. Anyway it wasn’t a view I’d heard before … I’d presumed that the whole thing was being driven by Dubyah, but it appears to have local support as well.
In conversation, Bev mentioned a friend nearby called Bill, who lived in Kona and who was doing a repeat photography project in Breckenridge, Colorado. Betsy hastily gate-crashed his evening and we had a meeting arranged for 8 o’clock – very opportune !!
I had an hours chat with Bill and was intrigued to find that he had turned up a completely unique set of pictures to work from and through his various presentations, was turning up yet more completely new archive material. His locations were not exactly precise … but were close enough for the area to be immediately recogniseable. Really interesting … and I taped an hour of discussion with him.
Finally back to Betsy’s house at the back of 9 after an exhaustingly long but really fulfilling day day. Packed our bags and fell in to bed after checking e-mail

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Diary Photos

A roadside stall for Leis

Re-photographing

Goin` Fishin`

Jan

Spinner dolphin
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