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  • From: Don Bowen <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Pacific island navigation was:Husking a coconut, removing the meat
  • Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:48:06 -0700

At 9/9/2004, you wrote:

Drinking the coconut juice is easier, if that's all you want---just hack a piece off the top where the stem was, expose a hole and drink.

I watched a Carolinian navigator and a girl from the FSM gut a coconut with a few wacks of a machete. They both used a similar technique. They grabbed a stake and sharpened both ends. One end was jammed into the ground and the other pointing up. A coconut that had fallen on the ground was smacked against the point several times and the husk removed. The navigator then showed me how to light a small fire in the husk then wrap fish in the smoldering husk. He said on the canoes they then hold the bundle in the wind and after a bit the fish was tender and ready to eat. He showed me how to wrap a smoldering husk to keep an ember going for days.

He wacked the point off the nut and drank the little bit of liquid then broke the nut and we all ate the meat. He cut another from the tree and with a wack of the machete that just missed his fingers cut the top off and we had fresh coconut milk. He told me that on long canoe trips all they took along was coconuts and fishing gear.

When he was about ten he was on a canoe in the Carolinas that was blown off course by a nasty storm. They were lost and the navigator could not find his star course in the overcast. Eventually he thought he knew where they were and headed on a course to Guam. When Guam became viable he turned around and sailed for home in Satawa. The whole trip was something like 6 weeks.

When he was about 16 he and some friends took a canoe to one of the other islands where their uncle took the boat away and told them to wait until he could get word back to Satawa that they were safe. They snuck away in the night to another island where another uncle took the mast from the boat. He said that trip was about a month all told at sea and they lived on coconuts and fish.

He now lives in Saipan and works for the Japan Water Company and is studying to become a great navigator like his uncle. His uncle is the one who taught Steve Thomas navigation which Steve later wrote about in "The Great Navagator". He is also bringing some people from Satawa to Saipan to carve a canoe. He asked me if I knew how to get grants to document the carving but I have not been able to figure out how. I would love to see that and be part of the documentation of a disappearing art.

Don Bowen
Awl Knotted Up Woodworking
Valley Center, CA http://www.braingarage.com






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