Bravery at Sea

Kiribati Canoe

Yesterday morning I took a canoe from Abaokoro, the capital of North Tarawa, safely back to Bairiki in South Tarawa. This is a distance of 18 km by sea. I loved every minute of this beautiful journey, which took over 2 hours.

Original 8 passengers

I waded out to the sea up to my waist to catch the canoe as the tide was low and the boat couldn’t come too close to the shore for fear of getting stuck there. Then, I handed my backpack and bag of cabbages to the captain and climbed aboard to join 8 other passengers.

We hadn’t gone far when we saw someone walking in the sea waving his arm at us. On the shore at the next village were at least 20 more people who wanted to come aboard. So, we stopped the boat and waited for them to wade out to us.

The scene on board was quite entertaining with a grandmother combing the long glossy black hair of her granddaughter, young girls singing songs, a woman breastfeeding her small baby, a catholic sister reading a book, small children throwing up over the side, and the sleeping man next to me that I kept pulling back from the edge of the boat so that he wouldn’t fall overboard.

The view was movie like with endless turquoise sea dotted with small coconut islands.

I was enjoying the ride so much that it never occurred to me that anything could go wrong. The sister had even told me that the last time she took the boat 8 men fell overboard but no one was hurt. We were hit from time to time by some big waves that splashed over us and at one point the captain stopped the canoe and waited for the rough waters to pass. None of us had life vests.

This morning on the bus to work one of my colleagues asked me if I heard about the accident on Saturday. She told me that a young child fell overboard on this same journey that I took one day before me. The captain jumped in to save the girl that was his daughter.  The rest of the passengers were women and they didn’t know how to stop the boat or swim. So, it kept going. The brave captain held his daughter up from the sea long enough for another boat to come and rescue them but drowned himself. God bless this man—a true captain.