Landfall: Rabaul, PNG

Journal excerpt from Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, 2018

We met Ron, captain of the tubby rust bucket m/v Barbarian, born and raised in PNG. Splayed toes of perpetually bare feet, a towel around his waist, bandaid slapped over some minor infection on his ankle, a still handsome face with far away pale blue eyes. Prepping her oh so slowly for a shipwreck finding rov research expedition. The engine is on the deck beneath a tarp, dozens of new weld patches in the hull. We sit at the commodious main table, moving a few stacks of paper, a one page calendar with a topless Korean, a socket wrench and a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude to make space for a cup of coffee handed to me by a kind-eyed woman. Ron leafs through the third in a pile of hard bound ledger books, stopping on a page of pencil scrawled coordinates. The wreck dives of Rabaul harbour. Coordinates that he himself collected via radar. Coordinates that we will find are shockingly accurate when we head to dive a Japanese zero and a tbf fighter plane the following morning. [...]
They roll in each evening like clockwork, their beer of choice cracked and coozied before their flabby asses hit the same stool on the same side of the half-hexagon bar; pot bellied, sun crisped, and glassy eyed from that nagging sense that they should have quit this place twelve years ago. They are the Rabaul expats (and a whopping 12 of them comprise the entire yacht club membership, the baker's dozen having keeled over just last week). A stressed out Scot who services life rafts on all the big ships that come and go, a hunched bespectacled muttering old Brit who owns the Coral Contessa tied to the other side of the dock and purportedly has many local girlfriends, and the Gogo Cola man: a shrewlike specimen who launches into an only briefly fascinating play by play of his soda factory. I could barely get down a sip of the rum cola after hearing that it is entirely a chemical soup.