Most of my cruising was in the Pacific islands. After a year wandering around through the Solomons, North of mainland New Guinea & to other places like
Guam, the Carolines & the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, I was offered a 2 month job reliving the
parts manager in a Rabaul company, while he went on his long leave. I joined the Rabaul yacht club, & later the Honiara yacht club, on Guadalcanal. I made a point of getting to their major races each year. When a club only has a few yachts, they love any extras, fast or slow that join them.
I got to know many plantation owners in the isolated atolls & smaller islands, & was asked to
repair some
equipment. I'm no professional
mechanic, but was better than anyone else they could get to these isolated places.
Then one found I had experience dynel sheathing, & asked me to do a new dugout canoe. These were used to load copra on the small 120 to 150Ft cargo boats. This was some canoe, 40 ft long, 7'6" beam, & they made a 25 Ft canoe from the other end of the log. It had been hollowed by burning in the traditional method, & took a lot of
work, but ended up a great
boat.
One night during this job he said what he really wanted was a jetty, but couldn't afford professional
steel pile driving. He had tried twice, with first coconut log piles hand set, & again with hardwood
logs brought in at considerable expense, but the teredo worms had said thank you, & destroyed them within a year.
I had heard of poured in place cement piles in
coral bases, & suggested he might try that, using the dozens of used 44 gallon drums his
fuel had come in as formers. Next day I got out the
scuba gear & we went looking for a suitable sight. We didn't need
scuba gear, there were number of spots where the
coral flat was only a few yards wide, with the face falling very steeply down to 80 to 100 ft deep. With the piles in 5 ft of
water the copra boats
keel would be in 30 to 40 Ft.
We blew the sand away from our chosen spot with a high pressure
pump, prepared the coral face to bond to cement with a pick, drove some 1" reo into the coral, fitted our 3 X 44 gallon drum former to the coral, & poured a pile using coral & sand from the beach, & some oldish cement he had lying around.
A month later he contacted me to tell me that after allowing curing time he attacked the pile with a
rope from the tractor, then from the next copra
boat. It was fine. Would I give him a list of what to order, & come out & over see the job when it arrived. We had a great time working out how to actually build a jetty, after pouring the piles, & it worked out great.
I had done this as a bit of fun helping a mate, but when I got back to Rabaul a couple of months later there was a quite substantial cheque waiting for me, but also 5 requests to build jetties for other plantations. The copra boat skippers had been enthusiastically spreading the word.
I build a dozen of these over the next 3 years, taking a month or so each, which provided great cruising funds. I'm sure there would be other services people in the islands would need today, particularly in modern technology.
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