2,500 Miles

Fish On His

Tail For

From W. H. Percival,

in Rarotonga

Schools of fish often follow

ships at sea for a few days, bu they seldom follow the same vessel for 2,500 miles. Yet c school of about 60 dorado, am all about the size of an average tuna, did this recently when the 3

followed single-hander Jim Lou

in rr his gaff-rigged cuttei

Tally Ho” from the Galapagos

Islands to the Marquesas.

It was as well for Jim that thev did because he left Panama with limited food supplies and had to ration himself carefully. The dorado, a type of dolphin, were a gift from Neptune.

They fed on flying fish—and Jim fed on the dorado. He hooked and ate 25 before the school finally left him.

' How could he be sure it was the same fish that followed him all that distance? When Tally Ho was becalmed the dorado rested in the shade of the hull, and he would slip overside and swim down among them. Several of the fish bore freshly healed wounds round their mouths.

These were fish which had taken his hooks but had managed to escape.

Into the pan

On good sailing days the dorado would surround the Tally Ho as they searched for flying fish. The flying fish would leave the sea and skim above the waves in desperate efforts to escape. But the dorado could swim almost as fast as their finny prey could fly, and they usually caught them.

Other flying fish would crash against the cutter’s hull and fall into the sea to be devoured by their hunters. A few would land on deck —and they went into Jim’s frying pan.

Jim Loudon is a New Zealander.

He bought Tally Ho in England and is sailing her to New Zealand where he intends to slip and refit her.

Afterwards he may do some com-

nercial fishing to offset his expenses.

“Tally Ho is a famous vessel,” he aid when he was in the Cooks ecently. “She was built in 1910. In 927, she won the Fastnet Cup— nd that race was a very big one n those days. When I was in a Spanish port a local man who could »arely speak six words of English ame up to me. He grinned hugely, minted at the ship’s stern and said, Tally Ho! Me know her. Been here nany time before.’ ”

“She’s even known here in Raro onga,” Jim went on. “Ronald towell, who’s building that fishing ampan, knows her.”

Crew left

Tally Ho, a 29 tonner and 47i t long, is registered at Brixham. •he looked like a big boat for one nan to handle, but Jim doesn’t have my trouble. He said: “She’s a good sea boat, and as ound as the day she was built. She’s milt of teak and oak, with copper astenings. She’s a quality boat, but ier sails will need renewing by the ime I reach New Zealand. However, ’d prefer to have a crew.”

He left England with a crew of hree other New Zealanders. They :alled in at Lisbon and spent three nonths in the Mediterranean. Ports >f call included Gibraltar, Algeciras, fangier, Casablanca and Las Palmas before they crossed the Atlantic to he West Indies. There the crew left he Tally Ho, and Jim used her in :harter work for three months.

Risks

Knowing the risks of engaging :rews in foreign ports, Jim decided ;o sail alone from there. From the Marquesas he sailed to Tahiti and Moorea before reaching Rarotonga.

He found Cook Islanders to be the friendliest people he had met an his voyage. “There was good sail ing in the Caribbean”, he said, “but you knew the people just didn’t like whites. Here, it’s different. When you step ashore you’re met with smiling faces and hospitality”.

Western Samoa: Waste

From R. F. RANKIN, in Apia Fed up with the continued failure of Parliament to act on his reports and tired of working

with inadequate staff. Western

Samoa’s Chief Auditor R. J.

Campagnolo resigned in disgust

earlier this year. He had been Chief Auditor since 1959 and need not have retired until 1970.

His final report, just tabled in

Parliament, was a farewell block buster.

In it he said many top officials were incompetent; there had been many cases of extravagance and waste of public funds; and the situation was worsening.

He cited cases of senior public servants and Ministers not paying rent for government houses; non payment for electricity supply by Ministers “and other dignitaries”, with individual outstanding accounts as high as $900; planters being paid incentive money for coconut trees that do not exist; continued serious financial irregularities in the Public Service; and a number of other questionable activities involving Ministers and various government officials.

He said that some officials did not act in the public interest; schemes had been sponsored by the govern ment without adequate investigation; too many officials acted out of self interest or privilege and were not controlled; and too many officials were lax in supervision.

Mr. Campagnolo said that until there was a considerable improve ment in moral fibre, discipline and the attitude of various officials and other authorities towards mismanage ment and maladministration, the public interest would continue to suffer.

“During my years of service, various authorities gave the impres sion at times that the question of a proper audit did not greatly matter,” said Mr. Campagnolo.

He concluded his report with the hope that his resignation would lead these authorities “to a proper realisa tion that their responsibilities to the people include a responsibility to see that an adequate audit service is obtained.”

In any other country, revelations of such Ministerial abuse of privilege would no doubt lead to public out cry, demanding heads. In Samoa,

politicians seem to be able to get away with anything but sexual in discretion. The Auditor’s report has caused a minor sensation but no action.

Despite the hard things the report says, the country is not reeking of corruption and most officials, if in competent, are honestly so.

As long as Chief Auditors can continue to present such blistering reports to Parliament and the public, Samoa’s officials and politicians are likely to remain nominally honest.

In other words, things are not really as bad as they might sound from the report.

Fiji: Nurses Go Bush

From SUE WENDT, in Suva In the event of complaints about conditions, pay, study requirements, etc., the nursing profession readily wins public sympathy. It has never been known for its rewards—other than the rather tenuous one of self satisfaction —and the faded image of Florence Nightingale is hardly enough to attract new recruits.

Until fairly recently nurses re frained from going on strike to settle their disputes, the welfare of patients remaining their first consideration.

The question of improved pay and conditions had to be settled through long drawn-out and frequently un satisfactory negotiation.

Now the ladies of the lamp have adopted a more militant stand. Strikes and threats of strikes swept Austra lian hospitals last year—and recently in Fiji, student nurses at Lautoka Hospital decided to adopt the same “improve-conditions or walk-out” technique.

More than 50 student nurses downed bedpans and bandages at midnight and fled to the hills, where they managed to avoid police, tracker dogs and anxious hospital staff until the following afternoon.

The situation was not without humour, though not for the girls.

They spent the night shivering with cold and sleeping on the ground at Tavakubu—for reasons which seem slightly confused.

The girls, Indians, Fijians and Chinese, said they had asked the Matron, Miss K. C. Maniram, for the same study-day conditions as nurses at Suva, whom they claimed got the night off before and after study-day, which is once a fortnight. Indian girls claimed there was discrimination against them. One girl said they’d been treated “like labourers, not students”.

Pu &,Nts

Miss Maniram said the student nurses had approached her without consulting the tutor sister and were very arrogant. She’d told them she would look into the matter if they returned to their duties, but they took to the hills instead.

Having been discovered next day in the mountains, the rebellious students returned to the hospital, pro mised never to make such a dramatic departure again and apologised to the hospital authorities.

According to the medical super intendent at Lautoka Hospital, Dr.

Dharam Singh, arrangements to meet the request for two nights off had been made only an hour before the girls left.

“The system just hadn’t had a chance to get under way,” he said, after the event.

A week later new rates of “pocket money” were announced for student nurses in Fiji. Effective from August 1, they are £4 a month for first-year students, £5 a month for second-year students and £6/10/- a month for third-year students. The old rates were £2, £3 and £4 respectively.

Niue: Beer Can Tappers

From J. Edward Brown,

on Niue On Niue Island most men tap the tops of their beer cans before they open them. If you ask them why they do it they say vaguely that it stops the can’s contents from squirting out all over the place.

I’d thought this a peculiarly Niuean custom, with no real basis in fact, but I was at a party the other night when a crewman from a visit ing yacht tapped his beer can.

He was a young American and he said he was a pseudo-aerospace engineer—pseudo because he’d never

actually designed anything in th< aerospace engineering field (he’c spent most of his working life as 5 public relations officer).

Anyway, I asked him why h< tapped the top of his can of beer. impedes the capillary action,’ he told me solemnly, and went intc a further involved scientific explana tion, concluding with the fact thai it only works with warm beer. With cold beer you don’t have to do it.

Though the beer he was drinkim was cold he still tapped the top oi the can before he opened it, and or Niue most men do it to beer cans whether the beer is warm or cold, sc it is a compulsive tic no mattei what an aerospace engineer says.

But maybe everybody everywhere taps the top of their beer can before they open it. And maybe it’s generally known everywhere that it impedes the capillary action.

But I don’t know because Niue is an isolated place, cut off from the mam stream of current customs and thought. It is far from any of the other scattered islands of the South Pacific—374 miles from Tonga and 320 miles from Western Samoa.

We occasionally see passing vessels moving along the horizon like toy ships, but they never acknowledge the presence of Niue. Only one ship a month stops here, the Union Steam Ship Company’s Tofua.

There is no airfield, though Niue is on the Fiji-Tahiti air route and big jets fly overhead.

You can lose your sense of pro portion in the endless days of sun shine, so a visiting yacht with new faces, new conversation and new thoughts (on such things as opening beer cans) is an event.

But you don’t realise how remote Niue is until something happens to bring it forcibly home. And that something, as far as we were con cerned, was a straw.

After three years on Niue Island we went home to New Zealand on furlough. On board the Tofua we relaxed in the lounge and watched the rather forbidding cliffs of Niue disappear. Then the bar opened and so I bought drinks from Dick, the long-time bar steward of the Tofua.

For our children it was lemonade and it came with ice and a straw.

Judith, the oldest, was just five and she’d never seen a straw in a drink before. She looked at it suspiciously and asked what it was.

And when she was told she wanted to know what to do with it. She was told to suck. She did and she smiled.

What an amazing place the outside world is, I thought wryly as I sipped my drink.