For 3 young men in a small fishing boat, it turns out that we made a very, very good decision when we decided not to stop at Abiang. After battling light wind, no wind, squalls, and big swells, we hadn’t actually made it very far by the late afternoon. When we were about 13 nmi SE of a small island called Marakai, the guys in the skiff approached us. They didn’t speak any English, so it was hard to get their story, but we parsed together that they had been out fishing for 8 hours and now they were lost. It was overcast and there were big swells and they didn’t know which direction their island was or how far it was. Tim got out the iPad and showed them on the charts, but then it turns out that they were also very low on gas. Their first question to us was if we had gas, but they have a 2-stroke outboard and we have a 4-stroke, so we don’t carry “premix” on board.
So, we ended up doing the obvious thing and gave them a ride back to their island, towed their boat, and fed them dinner. We arrived at Marakai just as it was getting dark, and we ended up anchoring off the village on the northwest side. Unfortunately, there is no navigable pass into the lagoon at Marakai so we had to anchor on the outside, and we were hoping it would be a tolerable spot and maybe it would be our ticket to wait for a better weather window to Majuro. Anyway, I shudder to think about the fate of these guys if we hadn’t crossed paths.
Gresham Family Exodus 