🇬🇧 I’m embarking with this serie "STOP" in stories of a few stopovers. I won’t do them in order, just out of desire and to dust off some old memories.
🇬🇧 I remember an abominable night. From the height of my very beginnings, however, I had the feeling to sail well my sailboat. More than 5 knots to cross the canal located between New Irland and New Britain, Aurora looked great. But that was before I turned around and started my 'Z' to go up the canal. The rain was building quite heavily, my edge was taken, everything was well adjusted, Aurora returned to port looking sharp at a good pace, but in a glance on my GPS screen all my positivity would suddenly collapse. Aurora was going back exactly on its wake that had led it this way. However, I had adjusted my sailboat to close range, Aurora should now move up the wind, but no, the track shows me a return to square one. For the first time since my young departure I find myself in a zone of very strong current. Whether it is on the tailed port or starboard, impossible to go up the canal. My edges were of a geometric plate! Outside the rain was forcing, the night was black and I couldn’t find the solution. In the absence of success in sailing, I was getting closer to the coasts, lowering all the sails and trying my luck with the engine, straight ahead, hoping that at the edge of the canal the current would be less strong. A knot. For the uninitiated: 1.85 km/h. That was my speed... It’s not fast! Even my friend @terresco runs faster sometimes...! It took me hours and hours to slowly climb up the canal and at the end of the day manage to reach the bay of Rabaul.
🇬🇧 Few people know Rabaul, but those who have visited it will remember it all their lives. Here the atmosphere of darkness rods. Rabaul is a city built in a gigantic caldera of several tens of kilometers in diameter. Three main exits, three volcanoes divert the caldera. In 1994, the three volcanoes erupted simultaneously. The city was destroyed by eruptions, by the ashfall, by tsunamis and mudslides. Nothing of the city remained. More than 500 people will have died. And I walk here 15 years later without really being able to understand or even measure the magnitude of the disaster. A layer of ash stitches over a large part of the area 15 years later. Sometimes in the middle of nothing, two or three steps come out of the background just to indicate that here, before, there was a house. What was not directly destroyed by the eruption burned under the fallout of ashes, and what did not burn was covered with mud. In the background, the Tavurvur still lets smoke escape as if to prevent everything from happening again one day.Further down the hiking path of the volcanoes, the macabre atmosphere becomes so striking that it becomes photogenic. The trunks of coconut trees without heads show us the remains of ancient forests, some aircraft carcasses and an ash trail make us guess the old airport, and the ochre colors on the way to the volcanoes prove that everything is still active.
🇬🇧 This stopover is unforgettable. The stories of the witnesses are all charged with nostalgia for an abundant life that we have difficulty imagining from our eyes as travelers passing through. On the day of my departure, the smoking cloud rising above the volcano gains momentum pushed off by the winds. There will be long hours in the wake of Aurora.
@terresco court parfois plus vite…!Il m’aura fallu des heures et des heures pour remonter tout doucement le canal et en fin de journée parvenir à rejoindre la baie de Rabaul.