Palmerston Atoll - the Cook Islands

by Nancy Knudsen on 29 Aug 2007 It's so silent here. So quiet, with just the soft wind noise whirring through the halyards. I can hear our tiny courtesy flag trilling a flat song in the 25 knot breeze. It's almost dark now, shshsh, don't make a noise, one solitary light towards land, three anchor lights from the other boats here. We're in Palmerston, in the Cook Islands.

'In' is rather a misnomer. We are hanging on a mooring buoy, behind a reef, at least six hundred nautical miles from the next landfall (Tonga), in the middle of the South Pacific. It's a coral atoll, and the islets are not more than a couple of metres above sea level. Below us is seventy five metres of water, and just behind, the water plunges to an unbelievable 4000 metres down a steep underwater cliff face.

Not far away out of the lee of this island, there are four metre seas – just a short while ago great leviathans of waves, great mountains of water, curvaceous, seductive even, long legs, thighs and breasts of water, were writhing and curving around our boat.

And now, as the sun sets over the flat palm tree encrusted islands spread along the reef here and there, we sit, rum and coke in hand, and marvel .

This afternoon as we arrived into the lee of the atoll, Bob Masters came to welcome us to the atoll – Palmerston Atoll. With the greatest of skill he fastened us to this mooring ball which seems just metres from the reef. He could not come aboard our boat, and we could not go ashore, he told us, because his brother, the Customs Officer for the island, would 'make trouble' for him.

He also told us he was the 'great x 5' grandson of the original William Masters, an Englishman who settled here in 1861 with no less than three Polynesian wives. Customs is not open on Sundays, so we must wait until Monday to check in – 'first thing Monday' he promises us.

After more than a month spent in French Polynesia, where checking in and out is done with the greatest casualness within 24 hours of arrival, we are aghast at this bureaucratic nonsense – 67 people live on this atoll,and they are all of the one family. It's hard to remember when last we had to stay 'on board' with out yellow Q flag flying until checking in was completed.

But that's tomorrow – now as we sit quietly and breathe in the evening, we are reminded of other remote atolls in our travels – Cocos Keeling, the Red Sea reefs, the Maldives.

If our dinghy were set adrift now, there's nothing between here and the Antarctic to stop it in its flight before the north-easterly wind. We can't wait to see this atoll about which we have heard the most extraordinary stories.

There is no airport and no regular boat service. We understand a freighter calls every three months or so with supplies, but irregularly.

Sixty-seven people – what on earth would it be like to live so remotely in a community of 67 people, all of them relatives?