With the station all but finished at Maota we started to concentrate on the one in Asau. Day 3, or 4, or whatever it was, at SAVW was not a great day. We had the intention of getting the station installed and running this day.
The weather had other intentions. It had been raining fairly heavily since early in the morning at the resort, but we figured we'd give getting some work done a go.
We were huddled under our tarp trying to get organized when Sooalo Tito Alatimu ("Tito"), the head of the field office that had come up with us to see what we were doing, started looking at us funny. Even though the area was a bit remote we were under the impression that it was fairly secure. Tito set us straight. The site wasn't in the middle of a high crime area or anything, but there was a village nearby, and the locals used the roads that ran by the field to get around. Tito felt that a setup similar to the other sites, where the equipment basically just sat out in the open with a bit of a fence around it, wasn't one of our best ideas. We just didn't know the area was so popular. After a bit of discussion -- mostly a lot of saying "yes"-- we decided to finish up backfilling the hole around the barrel, pack everything back up, and figure out what to do next.
It didn't dawn on us while we were getting soaked to the bone at the site that it was raining all over the island, and when it rains all over the water has to go somewhere. A whole bunch of it made its way back to the ocean right across our path back to the resort. In one of the bridgeless places a river that ran from high up in the mountains in the middle of the island down to the coast near Sasina kept us stopped for about an hour. It was nice to finally get back to Tanu that night. We'd been cold and wet all day. They kept some supper ready for us.
2021-07-27