| P-MAN X Update #28
- Interviews, stood up, and a shallow, silty dive
By the time breakfast was over, we still hadn't made contact with the man from Airai who says he has information about an airplane in the water east of the airport. Joe spent quite a bit of time on the phone trying to track him down. Eventually there was an "AHA!" moment: Joe said "We're looking for the wrong Vince." Heading down the correct-Vince path, Joe quickly made contact with him. He agreed to let us pick him up at the Airai dock at two o'clock. We jumped into Interview Mode and headed out. Went over to Arakabesan, to a former restaurant behind the new Cliffside Hotel to find our first interviewee. The place looked like an empty movie set. Big building. Boat in the yard. Car in the yard. Matched set of puppies on the porch, wagging their tails in perfect synchronicity. Just no humans. Maybe next time. Next we headed back to midtown Koror, to interview a man at the laundromat. Not a lot of information there, but every little bit helps. Next we headed out to the west end of Koror. The man we wanted to see had just returned home from the hospital and didn't feel like talking to us, but was willing to schedule a visit at his office tomorrow morning. Then we headed back to midtown to see if we could catch Johnson Toribiong, one of the current candidates for President of Palau. He is the nephew of one of the most important Palauans who worked with the Japanese during the war. We met with his wife in town, and she agreed to go back to Malakal with us to meet with her husband, who was on a pretty tight schedule but happened to have an opening for us. We did the interview in the dining room of a hotel. Next we grabbed our diving gear, headed to Neco, and started out for Airai to meet with Vince. We showed up at the appointed dock at exactly the appointed time. And waited. And waited. We called around, and even contacted the State office that he works for, all to no avail. After an hour and a half, the conclusion was inescapable: we'd been stood up. So Plan B for the boat was to return to Malakal Harbor and completely sweep the little nearly isolated cove below the spot where we found the Avenger horizontal stabilizer a couple of days ago. We did that. There were four of us: we were joined by Pat's friend Michael Callahan, an infectious-disease doc and DARPA guy who is here to consult with the Palauan health authorities on their status and preparedness. He's also a diver. And in case my son-in-law Greg reads this, Michael says he and Greg had a good time in Germany a few years ago. Hi, Greg. Anyway, this little cove is nearly round, and only about 30 feet deep in the middle, and we've snorkeled around in it many times while searching for (and occasionally finding) Avenger parts in adjacent waters and on adjacent hillsides. But like the rest of the coves along the south shore of Ngerchaol, the bottom is silty and the visibility is only 10-15 feet. We did a line-abreast sweep around the circumference of the cove, then three line-abreast straight-line sweeps back-and-forth across it, to pretty much cover the entire area. Pat was the only one who found aluminum, but it looks like something that fell off a small boat ... definitely too light to be aircraft.
All I saw besides silt-colored fish was a turtle. Nobody else saw the turtle, and I was afraid it had gotten out of range before I was able to get off a quick shot with the camera, but if you've got a good imagination you can see the rear end of a rapidly departing turtle right in the middle of the picture.
We drove back to Neco. We've run out of diving time. Some of us are planning to ship some of our dive gear back home rather than carry it in luggage, so we have to be sure it's dried out and packed up to send no later than Friday. Therefore, since this was our last dive day, we brought all of our gear back to the hotel (we've stored it in a locker at Neco since the first dive day, retrieving it for dives, then rinsing it and putting it back in the locker at the end of each dive day). Even if Vince somehow comes through before we leave, we won't be diving with him. Maybe next year. - Reid |
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Not
one to waste stuff - even stuff she doesn't particularly like - Laura volunteered
to prepare sort of a Flip Memorial
Breakfast this morning: SPAM, sauteed and seasoned with red
pepper, plus oatmeal. I'm guessing this would have been much more fun for
her if she hadn't had to actually touch the SPAM. But she sliced it beautifully,
and she was able to nicely duplicate
Flip's style, right down to the delicate charcoal color. Yum!
