Seabirds and Cockroach Kids

• 28 April 2026
• pacific,
• french polynesia

Thank goodness for my wonderful wife who is capable of sailing across an ocean, cooking, and keeping you all up to date on our voyage. So if you didn't read her last post, spoiler alert: we made it!!!

Now that we've found land I was able to go through some pictures from the trip, but don't expect anything too special. Land is currently vexingly wavy and wobbly and I haven't even been drinking.

I hope my bird-people are following along, because this will interest all 2 of you, and the rest of you can just scroll through quickly I guess, but you will be missing out and your life will be just a little less complete, even if you don't know it. Birds have a way of sneaking up on you, as some of my proudest moments were getting all of my shipmates to at, various times, ask "what bird is that?"

That is Millie Booby Brown (a red-footed Booby) and an unidentified seabird

Millie Booby looking for the best spot to poop on deck. Probably our penance for sailing a ship without a poopdeck.

This is a bird. It was at sea. It is probably a petrel. Maybe a petrel? I have no fucking clue.

Have I mentioned the difficulty of identifying seabirds? Chelsea and Jesse were gifted the seabird bible (thank you Hannah!) and I scoured it religiously day after day attempting to identify birds. It was extremely difficult and the vast majority of birds went unidentified. Or they were identified with vagaries such as "probably a petrel" to "definitely one of the many types of storm petrels."

Now for the crew:

And with that we set anchor in a ridiculously gorgeous anchorage.

Note the Great Frigatebirds fishing in the frothy waters in the center

Our first proper excursion on Nuku Hiva was to go grab some baguettes, French wine, cheese, and head to a nearby site with ruins, tikis, etc.

Sarah has always wanted to go to Easter Island. So far this is as close as she's gotten.

Yes, I have been enjoying some black and white shooting. But only where appropriate.

Now that you've been regaled with photos, it is time to tell you about the cockroach kids. After we did our hike and ate our bread and cheese and drank our wine we came back to our dinghy to see a small army of young French people clambering up the ropes and ladder by our dinghy. And they had trashbags. Huge trashbags. And they had clearly just loaded up our dinghy with them as they worked their way toward shore (the dock area is very small and there's a sea of dinghys to be crawled across). But most people are a little more thoughtful about flinging trashbags from one dinghy into another.

So as we sat there waiting for them to move their trash, one of them plopped a bag down and a giant bug shot out at Sarah. She jumped back and it flew down into a dinghy. As you may have guessed, it was a giant cockroach. So here these kids had been sailing with trash full of cockroaches for who knows how long, clearly not too concerned about any of it. We see them around town, and they will forever be the cockroach kids.

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