Monday. At last we can do something to find out whether the shipments of scientific, construction and dive equipment have come through. And maybe Nico on the Ceres will blow in from Madagascar today. The Vake -lele is a small boat, and the extra space is really needed.
The shipping agent says the first shipment was on the Saturday British Airways flight (the same one I came on). They should be able to deliver to the Seychelles Yacht Club, where we have temporary membership, at 11am tomorrow. The delay is "because of 11th September" - the scanners at Heathrow are working overtime and some had broken down, or some such story.
This promised arrival is some encouragement. But we still know nothing of the whereabouts of two boats crucial to the expedition. We can't do anything. The time window, already narrow, is closing. Huge energy has gone into getting this far and now we're stuck. It's like one of the Rolling Stones described life: one year of playing and nineteen years of hanging around. Only without the playing bit. Tristes tropiques indeed.
On the Vake-lele we are downwind of the tuna canning factory for much of the time. It's like living on top of a sewer full of rotting fish. But the mountains surrounding the harbour are simply smashing.
A few things about Tom Goreau. Tom is small and in his early 50s. He has a full beard and curly grey black hair. A rolling Jamaica accent is overlaid by many decades living in the US. Married with two daughters in Chappaqua, New York. Tom's ancestry appears to encompass five hundred years of Caribbean history. For example, one of his ancestors founded the Cuban Academy of Sciences in the mid eighteenth century.
Talking about this, Tom becomes passionate. "The amazing hunger for and love of education and knowledge you see in Cuba today is not something Fidel created, although he's a major intellectual as world leaders go. It's a cultural tradition, embedded over more than 200 years, and unique as far as I know in the so -called third world. And that is largely thanks to people like my great great (I get lost counting the 'greats') grandfather".
I'll write about Tom's scientific career when I've pieced it together more fully. He's reckoned to be one of the most knowledgeable coral biologists in the world, but has worked in many other fields. It started in astronomy. "Intellectually fascinating, but absolutely useless".
In the early 80s he was in the Brazilian Amazon, measuring fluxes of greenhouse and other gases. He and his team were able to determine precisely the differences between various land types and vegetation cover - from untouched forest through various kinds of human disturbance. Then the funding stopped. "The research was too inter-disciplinary: soil scientists, climate scientists, forest biologists and others all said it was brilliant, but it didn't fit in their silos".
Later NASA poured hundreds of millions into measuring fluxes from space. Tom thinks this money is largely wasted. "They cannot tell, as we were able to do, exactly where the gases they measure are originating". I'm not sure he's right on this, but obviously can't check at present.
In the evening Hartmut manages to get through on the phone to Madagascar (a minor miracle at the best of times; all the more in the present troubles in that country). He speaks to his girlfriend. Nico stranded his boat at the last spring tide in Madagascar, and won't be able to get off the hard until 28 Feb or 1 Mar. This doesn't sound very bright. It also raises a problem: most of the team is arriving later this week, and there is nowhere to put them.
Caspar Henderson
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