Day 8 (Friday, June 20) by Mike

Sailing with Dummies (Hawaii to Alaska Edition)

We went by Laysan Island today. There’s not much to see but the island has an interesting history. It’s about two miles long and a mile wide covering more than 1000 acres. It has a pond in the middle of it that is almost 1 mile long. The pond is extra salty, even more than the seawater surrounding the island. We saw somewhere around one jillion birds flying around the island. They looked like swarms of gnats in the distance.

What makes the history interesting is the extreme harvesting of birds’ feathers, guano, and albatross eggs that took place in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There were hundreds of thousands of birds killed for their feathers alone during this period (used primarily for fashion in Japan). Some of the feather, guano, and egg harvesters brought rabbits and guinea pigs to the island for food. The rabbits multiplied and killed off most of the vegetation on the island (leaving the tobacco plants). What was a lush island became bare.

In 1909 Teddy Roosevelt made the island a wildlife preserve, which was a good thing. He even arrested some Japanese poachers and threw them in jail.

Today when we passed near the island (about a mile away) someone called on the radio and wanted to know where we were coming from, where we were going, and did we have permission to be around the island. That’s a little bit overdone, in my opinion. I mean, come on, we’re a sailboat out in the middle of the Pacific. Maybe a “hi, how’s your trip going” would have been more appealing. I’m not sure what kind of trouble we might have caused from that distance. We installed special VMS tracking for this trip (expensive and required to visit Midway) so they can see exactly where we are at all times. But I guess there are Barney Fife’s everywhere making this world a better place. Somehow I don’t think that’s what Teddy had in mind in 1909.

Daily Cuisine:

The most exciting culinary item today was a baked potato.

Fishing Report:

Fishing is still not allowed in this national monument.

Arts and Entertainment:

Bob got some really old books about this area. Some are so old that the paper stinks. If fact, “The Last Cruise of the Saginaw” was so smelly that I tried to keep it downwind while I read it. This book was published in a first edition of 150 copies by Houghton Mifflin Company.

These books give a refreshing point of view, having been written in the early 1900s and referring to logs and writings from the 1800s. Among the stories are accounts of shipwrecks along the islands we are passing, and people surviving for months on the islands. What makes them particularly interesting to us now is their comments on the places we have been and are going.