The vagaries of time
Fish are weighed by the basketful at Shoreline in Majuro
by Christine Kling
We’ve now been back aboard the boat for a week and a half, and I have completely lost track of the world outside the lagoon here at Majuro Atoll. The pace of life aboard a cruising boat is very different, and it takes a while to acclimate. We work on the boat, go shopping at Payless or K&K food markets, and watch the goings on of the local scene. Yesterday, when I was supposed to be writing a blog, we got involved with watching the weigh-in at the All-Micronesia Fishing Tourney.
The rain started then and we couldn’t get back to the boat without getting soaked, so we shrugged our shoulders and settled in to watch the hundreds of pounds of reef fish that were offloaded from each boat.
While we were there, I met and started chatting with a couple off a boat from Slovenia (the first cruisers I’ve met from that country). We chatted a bit about the sailing in the Adriatic, the Med and the Aegean, and I told them how much I had loved visiting Turkey recently. The fellow told me that I should have seen that coastline 20 years ago, and again, I was struck by the vagaries of time. 
People get hung up by thinking about ‘the good old days’ and thinking that there were better times than these. It sometimes blinds them to the cool stuff happening today. When I was in the South Pacific 35 years ago, you didn’t see the local island people with the kinds of boats they have today. They also didn’t have supermarkets, access to the Internet, good medical care, and many of the things we take for granted in North America. It’s not fair of us to want the world to change at our pace, according to our timeline. One of the coolest things I saw at the fish weigh-in yesterday was a local guy taking video of the weigh-in with his 7″ Android tablet.
The fact is that here is Majuro, I can’t keep up with the very real vagaries of time when trying to deal with friends and appointments and phone calls and deadlines with people who live all over the world. I keep my world clock app on my iPad set to let me know if friends, family and business associates are awake or asleep and behind me or ahead.
But even that didn’t help me this week with getting my blog up on time.
Fair winds!
Christine
Share on Facebook
