We had roughly 1,250 nautical miles to cover to Port Moresby, and the passage took us about nine days. The long ocean legs had started again — the kind where, after ten days of nothing but sea, one day slowly begins to look exactly like the one before it. We spent the time reading, sleeping, standing watches and, more and more, fishing.
The Mediterranean had almost killed our enthusiasm for fishing. We would drag lures behind the boat for hours, sometimes days, and absolutely nothing would happen. The Pacific was different. As fishermen would say, it had finally started to work. There were very few long stretches where we didn’t hook something.
Most of what we caught was tuna, and fishing quickly became a serious part of life on board. Every now and then we would also hook a barracuda, but we usually released those. The tuna, on the other hand, went straight onto the cutting board and not long after that onto the plate.
By then I had become pretty good at filleting tuna. After a few fish there was no more improvising. I knew where to run the knife, how to work along the backbone and how to take off four clean loins with as little waste as possible. I had also learned to remove the dark strip of meat along the spine, the so-called bloodline, which has a much stronger, more metallic flavour.
The funny thing was that I was already much better at cleaning tuna than at explaining what kind of tuna I had just cleaned. At the beginning, as far as I was concerned, tuna was mostly just tuna.
Only when we reached Port Moresby and had decent internet again did I download a pile of material about pelagic fish. I started reading properly about yellowfin, skipjack, albacore, bigeye tuna, as well as marlin, sailfish, swordfish and the other large species you can come across in open water. I started looking at fins, body proportions, colour, finlets and other details, and realised there was a whole little science behind what I had previously just called “tuna.”
Fishing gradually stopped being just a matter of throwing a lure behind the boat and seeing what happened. I started to understand what we were catching, how the different species differed, and why certain fish appeared where they did. Quite unexpectedly, Port Moresby became my own little school of pelagic fishing.
As we approached northern Australia and the Torres Strait, Australian patrol aircraft started flying over us more and more often. They would contact us and ask the same series of questions: how many people were on board, where we had come from, where we were going, what we were carrying and when we expected to arrive. It was obvious that the Australians watched that part of the sea very closely and were particularly interested in illegal migration and anything moving toward their coastline.
We had no plans to stop in Australia because I didn’t have an Australian visa. When I had looked into the application earlier, they wanted an exact date of entry and exit, which was almost impossible for me to provide while travelling by sailboat. Your arrival date is decided by wind and sea, and neither of those cares what you have written on an immigration form.
If I wrote that I would arrive on the fifteenth and the wind decided I was arriving on the eighteenth, who exactly was I supposed to explain that to? In the end I decided not to get involved in the whole process, and we simply passed Australia by.
We reached Port Moresby in the morning. The sky was grey and there was occasional rain, but we were lucky because the marina was relatively empty. We got an excellent berth almost immediately near the entrance, tied up and, after nine days at sea, finally stepped onto solid ground again.
We were at the Royal Papua Yacht Club, which was almost a little world of its own. There was the yacht club, the marina, a fishing tackle shop and an entire community of people for whom boats, fishing and the sea were everyday life. After ten days of studying tuna on our own deck, it felt as though we had arrived in exactly the right place.
Port Moresby is the capital of Papua New Guinea and sits on the coast of the Gulf of Papua. It was named in the nineteenth century by British naval officer John Moresby, who named the harbour after his father, Admiral Fairfax Moresby. Today it is the political, administrative and business centre of the country, but at first sight it does not feel like a conventional capital.
It is not compact. It spreads through valleys and over the surrounding hills, with entire parts of the city almost functioning separately from one another. Only when we drove over one of the hills did Port Moresby really open up in front of us, and for the first time we could see how large it actually was.
Below us were wide roads, commercial and industrial zones, shopping centres and new buildings, while houses climbed the hills around them. The city looked large and unfinished at the same time, as though it were expanding faster than it could connect its own parts. In some places everything looked brand new, while a few hundred metres away the picture was completely different.
Then it became clearer why there was so much construction going on. Port Moresby was preparing for the 2018 APEC summit, which was due to take place only a few weeks after our visit. The city was full of new roads and building sites, and on one of the hills we saw a huge modern structure nearing completion — the new Hilton, part of the Star Mountain Plaza complex.
It looked almost surreal. In the middle of green hills, dust and construction sites stood a giant modern hotel that looked completely different from everything around it. I had the impression that a new Port Moresby was being built directly over the old one.
And then, of course, you came across a giant industrial building that looked as if someone had literally cut a chunk off it. Across the side, in enormous red letters, it said:
SAFETY FIRST.
I never worked out whether that was supposed to be a warning or local humour, but the photograph said enough on its own.
The city in general gave me a strong impression of contrast. The marina, better restaurants, shops, business buildings and newer districts were clearly the world of wealthier residents and the large expatriate community, especially Australians. Only a few streets away, life could look completely different.
At the time I did not know enough about Papua New Guinea to draw any grand conclusions, but my impression was that several different worlds existed side by side without ever fully merging. One was modern, air-conditioned and fenced off. The other was much rougher and lived according to patterns that had existed long before all the new roads, hotels and shopping centres.
One of the first things we noticed everywhere was buai, or betel nut. People chew it with other ingredients, including lime, and the result is a distinctive red saliva that leaves incredibly stubborn stains on streets, walls and pavements. At first I had no idea what I was looking at. I just noticed that half the city seemed to be splattered with something dark red.
Betel nut is not a hallucinogen, as I had initially assumed, but a stimulant deeply rooted in local culture. The spitting problem is obviously so widespread that chewing it is strictly prohibited in more formal places. Even at the Royal Papua Yacht Club there was a large sign showing a crossed-out betel nut and warning that employees caught chewing buai on club premises could lose their jobs.
After that, it became impossible not to notice the red stains all over the city.
At the marina we also met the man who effectively became our host in Port Moresby. He was an older local man with albinism and a serious sailing background. He had spent the 1970s and 1980s travelling extensively by boat and, as I understood it, had sailed around the world. By then he was living at the marina, and one of his main pleasures seemed to be welcoming cruising sailors who arrived from some distant corner of the world.
He was one of those people you only meet because you travel by boat. Had we arrived by plane, stayed in a hotel and flown out three days later, we would probably never have known he existed. Instead, we ended up sitting on his boat, talking about travel, sailing and life.
He also told us that over the years he had “adopted” and helped an enormous number of children, supposedly close to a hundred. I never fully understood how much of that was formal adoption and how much was his way of saying that he had taken children under his wing, fed them, helped educate them and looked after them. Either way, his family was not exactly small.
One day one of those sons turned up, a boy in his late teens. Our host asked whether he had been to school and whether he was preparing for his exams. The boy replied, with complete lack of interest, that school did not concern him very much.
He was going to hunt kangaroos.
I stopped for a second.
Kangaroos?
Papua New Guinea does, of course, have its own kangaroos and related marsupials, including the famous tree kangaroos, so the statement was not quite as absurd as it first sounded. Still, moving directly from a conversation about school exams to “I’m going to hunt kangaroos” described the cultural distance between our world and his rather well.
Our host also had his own name for part of the marina population. They were not trailer trash, he said, but:
marine trash.
People who had lived on old boats for years, moved from marina to marina and carried their entire lives in a few square metres of deck space. Naturally, he said it with enough self-deprecating humour to make it very clear that he probably included himself somewhere in that category.
He offered to drive us over the hill to another part of the city, where the larger shops and shopping centres were, so we would not have to waste money renting a car. We accepted and spent practically the whole day with him driving around Port Moresby. He also told us there was not much you could easily reach by car outside the city anyway, because the road network was not particularly extensive.
That day allowed us to see a part of Port Moresby that was impossible to imagine from the marina. Wide new roads, enormous commercial buildings, construction sites, hills and entire new districts that seemed to be growing out of the ground. From one viewpoint we could see across the whole valley, and for the first time Port Moresby started to look like a proper city rather than simply the harbour where we happened to have stopped.
Despite all those new developments, street life moved to a completely different rhythm. We saw many people chewing buai, a lot of improvisation and plenty of scenes that felt rough to us. A few times we came across people who seemed disoriented or aggressive, but I had no way of knowing whether that had anything to do with buai, alcohol, something else, or simply life in the city.
I also could not shake the impression that part of the population was struggling to accept the world being built around them at such speed. On one side there was the new Hilton and APEC. On the other were people whose way of life had very little connection with any of that. It felt as though modernisation had arrived much faster than society had been given time to decide what to do with it.
Then you returned to the marina in the evening and saw something that reminded you where you actually were.
Long outrigger canoes passed us with teams training together, everyone paddling in rhythm while the side float cut through the water and the sun went down behind them. We were no longer in Polynesia but in Melanesia, yet the Pacific was still very much the Pacific.
Outrigger canoes are not exclusively Polynesian. Different forms of them have existed across Island Pacific and Melanesia for centuries. Watching them train beside modern yachts, it looked as though two completely different eras were moving naturally through the same harbour.
We spent the rest of our time preparing for the next leg. Provisioning, small repairs, new fishing equipment, material I was downloading from the internet, and of course fuel. We were running seriously low by then, so Port Moresby was exactly the right place to fill the tanks before the next major passage.
Even the fuel system had its own slightly complicated logic. You bought cards, used the cards to pay for fuel, and then returned whatever balance remained so they could refund the money. A little unnecessary running around, but after everything we had already been through in the Pacific, it barely registered as unusual.
After a week we were rested, the supplies were full again, the boat was ready, and I knew far more about tuna than I had when we arrived. Ahead of us was another very long passage.
Our next destination was Indonesia.
Bali. Port Benoa.
And with that, our Pacific journey was slowly beginning to come to an end.