Absent minded

I think deep down I have always been a little absent minded or forgetful – whatever you like to call it, which is why I always write lists and then I can happily forget things. Having this trait of forgetfulness has meant that I rarely ever have to cook a meal, which is a real bonus; as it was the burning of the boiled eggs that put Melv off my cooking.

Well coming to the Seychelles hasn’t helped this trait, Melv asks me to stir the dhal and I forget - so yes it burns in the pan. However it turns out to be more serious lately in relation to our drinking water supply. Aride doesn’t get its name from a history of being wet – it is dry for many months and at times the rain clouds just seem to avoid us. Well we have two seasons, the North West monsoon which is the wet one and the South East which is the dry one. During the North West we have to fill all our barrels with water off the roof, which we then use for drinking, this then needs to last us through the SE and into the next NW when it rains again, so a period of what can be 5 months without rain. The other added complication is that the number of birds that live on Aride means that our roofs tend to get rather dirty with pooh and so we have to wait for heavy showers to wash them clean before we can start harvesting clean water.

Before we drink this water we pass it through filter which will take a further nasties out of it, the filter takes a couple of kettle loads at a time and so has to be filled up about 3 times a day from the larger barrels. This was always Sal’s job. Well you can probably guess what is coming, mmmm whilst filling up a kettle from the barrels one day to top the water filter up, I left the tap on and managed to drain out half a barrel of drinking water, so reducing the supplies to 5 – Melv found out...

Then when I did it the next day from a new barrel – so reducing our supplies to 4 – Melv wasn’t happy... Sal was instantly dismissed as water monitor.

I can laugh about it now – and as I write this I am sitting in a tropical storm and all barrels and buckets are full. I have never been so glad to see rain as I was a few days ago, after 6 weeks without – I thought we were heading for the SE, with not a drop of rain to be seen.

Melv's friend Matthew sent Melv & Sal some really useful presants for the tropics!

Thanks Matthew we really appreciate your thoughtfulness....

Highs and Lows

When we were applying for this job and contacted people who had been here and who knew the island, the general trend was that there were very big highs and equally poor lows. Well the numerous new wildlife experiences, like the turtles and the hatchlings, together with working with Magpie Robins have provided some unforgettable highs and I’ve kind of been waiting for the lows, knowing that poaching and seeing the devastation is causes would be one.

However I don’t think I was prepared for another ‘low’, which is rather apparent at the moment, and that has got to be the effect of Pisonia, the pioneering species of tree that has colonised the island since the coconut plantation was removed. It is a very clever species; it has a rather evil side and is responsible for many bird deaths. How? - well it has got very sticky seeds, which is how it spreads, but the seeds are so sticky that they literally stick everything together, as you walk around the paths they stick to your feet. To birds this is devastating and fatal, the Pisonia sticks to their feathers, so well that it sticks their wings and tails together and they literally cannot fly. It is horrible to see as the birds limp along trying to avoid you covered in this deathly sticky seed. The main birds that suffer are those that nest on the ground, like the white tailed tropic birds, however it is now common to see fairy terns, brown and lesser noddys, turtle doves, moorhens and even magpie robins. Some birds deal with it better than others, the terns don't seem to stand a chance, where as the robins, moorhens and doves seem to manage to pull the effected feathers out. Some of the terns that aren't too badly affected and that can be caught can be de seeded, it can be a difficult task, but it’s that or die anyway. It is the best feeling when you manage to clean a bird, throw it in the air and watch it fly off shaking itself disgruntled but very relieved to feel free and able to fly again.

The last couple of days have definitely been the worst I have seen it, the tropic birds particularly are suffering, they are such awkward birds, made for life on the sea, they struggle on the ground the best of times and once Pisonia is attached they find it almost impossible to take off or get rid of it. They spend so much time on the floor they inevitably in an attempt to get away just become more and more pickled in it. It is extremely distressing to see them, as there is absolutely nothing you can do. Today alone doing the fairy tern monitoring, I came across 3 on the path - just today in the space of 2 hours. We can't believe that the breeding birds are replacing the number that are being lost, especially the tropic birds. The most distressing thing is seeing the trees full of seeds, just ready to mature as the breeding season approaches; already the ground is becoming covered, catastrophic for our feathered friends. It would seem to us that poaching has nothing on Pisonia, for the number of lives we have already seen it take.

A different type of wildlife lands on the shores of Aride.

By hook or by crook, yesterday we successfully got a group of 23 school children and their teachers on to the island – the first time it has ever been done. Courtesy of one of the tour operators, Masons, we managed to get a boat big enough and safe enough to bring the group over. Masons have got large catamaran, it was perfect, and a total of 45 people travelled safely across from Praslin.

It was excellent to see the children’s faces as they landed on the island, after the excitement of landing on the beach in the Aride rib subsided, they began to look and see the wildlife all around them and they tugged at my arm when they saw something new. Although I have only been in twice to work with the children from Grand Anse, for many that was enough to get over their shyness and a couple of them gave me a hug as they arrived, some just pulled at my shirt, others shook my hand, and then some just smiled shyly, still a little unsure. So I needn’t have been apprehensive about the day at all, the whole party were just pleased to be here.

The day went fantastically well, we gave two tours for the young people, one in English and one in Creole. The local TV and radio were here and they interviewed both staff and the children and got footage from start to finish, which is going to be used on the news and for children’s television. Altogether it was an excellent day and for ICS and us on Aride, we couldn’t have done it much better, and I just hope it is the start of things to come and the beginning of doing more with our local community.

In some ways compared to the UK, trips to Aride for children are so easy, good weather is pretty much guaranteed, the chance of getting a day of rain would be very unlucky, there is the beach and the sea which are fantastic places to get rid of all that energy that kids have, and cool down, and then there is the wildlife, in the UK you have pray you may get a glimpse of something to show the young people to keep them interested, here it is so close to the path you have to be careful not to step on it. But then there is the other side the small issue of the 6 nautical miles between us and Praslin which can prove to be a logistical nightmare, but not yesterday – it couldn’t have worked out better.

As I sit and write this the morning after, the storm clouds have gathered and we have got a tropical storm with heavy rain, thunder and lightning – what was it I said about the weather....

Red Snapper for breakfast, dinner and tea!!

His


















and hers!!

Tourists

One of the jobs that I was least looking forward to before we came out, was dealing with tourists. I’d seen these poxi TV fly on the wall programmes about tour operators and facilitators in holiday resorts getting continual grief from thick drunk people who shouldn’t have been given a passport until they could prove they’d learnt some manners or knew when to shut up!. Well pleasant surprise, it’s quite the opposite.

The money we get from tourists funds the conservation work and it’s desperately important we improve on our visitor numbers. With that in mind, we have put a lot of effort into getting our operation much more professional.

We basically get three types of client, private hire; people from hotels who hire a boat to get to us, self sail; people who’ve hired dammed expensive yachts and sail aimlessly around trying to find something to do, and cruse ships. No matter how they get to us, all boats and ships have to moor off shore, we then go out to them and pick them up in our rib. We don’t allow any boat other than are own to land on the island, this is part of our invasives protocol, basically we are trying to stop rats and alien insects getting to the island. So we’ve got them off their boat and into ours, how do we get them ashore with no jetty and never less than 1m waves crashing onto the beach, simple, a very experienced boat driver drives the boat flat out at the beach, catches the wave just right and ploughs the boat up the beach, all very safe and very exciting for our guests, well, exciting anyway.

Different people deal with this adrenalin rush in different ways, most people love it and it’s a great start to their visit, puts them in a good mood which hopefully means they spend lots of money in the shop, but the odd person doesn’t deal with it at all well. The last cruse ship we had, by the way we’ve got cruse ships off to a tee, we can land 100 people and get the first tour going in less than 20mins, half the time it took before we came, anyway the last one we had went like clockwork. Our boat went out to pickup the last load of guests less than half an hour from the first, he picked them up and made a perfect landing, even with quite high waves, as the boat hits the shore, the beach crew gets to the boat as fast as possible just in case there ‘s a problem, no problem. I go to the boat and say in my cheeriest way “good morning welcome to Aride” this little white haired lady looked up at me and shouted, f--- off! The beach landing was just to far from her comfort zone. Me and the lads laughed so much we couldn’t off load the guests for a good few minutes, she latter apologised when I met her in the shop, I said “ no need to apologise, it’s one of those great moments I‘ll remember for the rest of my life. She was so embarrassed; she spent loads in the shop, good old girl.

We’ve met so many nice and interesting people in our short time here, from the doctor who works with the leperacy project in Africa, to head of finance of a top New York bank, whom by the way, I think, I convinced to give up his job and sail around the world?
The people are great, their fascinated by our primitive way of life, with some I can almost see sympathy in their eyes, but as I point out to them, we’re not leaving paradise of the Seychelles next week. I really do enjoy having guests, perhaps it’s because I know there gone in two hours and the sound of human noise fades away and we’re left with the birds and beach all to our selves.

Tricky times are behind us

Not too many entries for a few weeks, because it’s been the worst 3 weeks so far, we just didn’t feel like it.

Before we got here we were told from other wardens that the staff could be a problem, they were right!

We lost the Head Ranger a month ago, he had to leave because of his family, this was a real blow to us because he was very, very good, hard working and had control of the rest of the rangers. We advertised but couldn’t get the quality of person needed for that post, so we then advertised for a ranger and employed a young lad of 22. He had good boat skills but came with a health warning, he was known to be disruptive and liked a drink. At the interviews he came across very pleasant and said that his drinking days where over, he was the only one we interviewed that could do the job.

To cut the story the short he made our life a misery, he was disruptive, he also had a negative effect on one other member of staff, who has no personality of his own (which is OK because I can control him) but parasitizes other peoples. It got to a stage where it was extremely difficult to remain in control. It’s not at all like working at home where the staff want to do well and achieve, here is like working with delinquent children and being friendly just lands you in the shit! It ended with our boat engine going up in flames, in the fuel store with all the petrol for the boat stored in it, 6 full gas bottles and the 5000lt petrol tank directly outside. If it had gone up, which we can’t understand why it didn’t, it is hard to imagine what the consequences would’ve been.

We sacked him.

We now have an extremely good new Head Ranger, Tony, who just wants the island to do well, he’s very interested in wildlife and is personally ambitious, this is just the sort of person we can work with, with Tony’s help the island is calm again and the setbacks sorted.