Filed at 11:02 pm under Travel and Diving by glennstu
One of the best things about working on Roi-Namur was that once a year I got to take a one-month vacation. Typically I would stop in Honolulu for a couple of days to get use to civilization again. It is quite an adjustment to go from an island of about one hundred people where nothing moves faster than maybe 20 mph to a bustling city the size of Honolulu. I would see more people in one city block than Kwaj and Roi put together. I would always stay at the Ohana on Lewers St. (spelling?). It was close to the beach and there always seemed to be a lot of activity going on. There was also a breakfast place I like to go to close by. They had pancakes with cocoanut syrup on it that was very delicious. The rest of the time I would usually spend in Seattle with my children. I was always careful to return to the Marshall Islands in enough time so that I would not have to pay US income taxes. That was another benefit to living there.
Something I could have done was to visit San Carlos, Mexico on my vacation time but I didn’t. Instead I went there last weekend with my company’s dive club. Read more »
Filed at 10:10 pm under Island Life and Cultural by glennstu
A Dave Barry article that was posted this week on the Miami Herald web-site brought to mind an incident on Kwajalein atoll. The article discussed modern art in public places and questioned whether the average tax payer would appreciate large sums of money being spent on an object that essentially looked like a mangled air conditioner. It was something like that. It reminded me of a controversial art object on Kwajalein. In this case it was a mermaid statue that (parents don’t let your kids read this part) had her breasts exposed. I would not say it was exactly anatomically detailed if you catch my drift but if you looked at it and were a love starved bachelor you could imagine that they were breasts. There are many such bachelors there especially on gender deprived Roi-Namur. Well, a certain well intentioned woman decided the statue was pornographic and complained to the authorities. I hope this lady never goes to Europe because I’ve seen photos of the statues there such as Michelangelo’s David and Venus de Milo and they are much more detailed than this mermaid. But the authorities on Kwaj are sensitive to offending the public so they covered the mermaid with a t-shirt. I don’t know if the lady in question (who is an otherwise nice lady that I was friends with) did not consider that good enough or they were worried the t-shirt would come off but eventually they removed the statue altogether based on one person’s complaints. Read more »
Filed at 12:19 am under Island Life and Travel and Diving by glennstu
I got involved in some hunting last weekend. There is no large game in the jungles of Kwajalein atoll so the sportsman must seek his game in and around the water for the most part. Sunday I awoke to a gloriously splendid day. The skies were blue and the air was warm as usual. It was my day to go diving. The week prior my friend Jeff had lost his dive knife on the wreck of a Japanese cargo ship that had been sunk during the battle here. He asked if we could go back to it to try to find it so we did. But we didn’t have any luck finding the knife. For our second dive we chose a coral head off of Third Island. It was beautiful there as usual. We saw the usual assortment of fish, coral, and sharks…. Read more »
Filed at 8:39 pm under Island Life by glennstu
Today’s topic was not written while on Roi. I have a few more great articles from my life there to post but as a service to my friends who are still incarcerated on Roi I thought I would share with them some of the modern marvels that are enjoyed here in the US that are not yet available on Roi (or at least they weren’t available when I lived there). The technology I will write about is not quite the high tech stuff you could enjoy reading about on www.lightning-alley.com but some more common items that just were not available on Roi.
The first is what I will refer to as the Electronic Toilet eruption because it sounds funny…. Read more »
Filed at 8:08 pm under Cultural by glennstu
Many people have never heard of the Marshall Islands or if they have it may only have been in reference to Bikini where nuclear testing was once done. A few more may have heard of Kwajalein, a US Army missile test site, and some may have heard of the World Class SCUBA diving and fishing that exists here. But those who have been to the islands and certainly those lonely men on Roi-Namur would have heard of the legendary Arno Atoll. While conducting my in-depth research on the subject of Arno I came across this description of Arno on the internet:… Read more »
Filed at 10:36 pm under Island Life by glennstu
Iakwe,
The football season is on us which brings to mind my time on Roi where I was the president of the Marshall Island Browns Backers. Everyone who knows me knows that I am passionate when it comes to my support of the greatest sports franchise of all time the Super Bowl Bound Cleveland Browns. While I was on Roi I decided it would be cool to start a chapter of the Browns Backers there. The only problem is that to be officially recognized by the Browns you need 15 members. We had 4 guys there from northern Ohio. I recruited all of them to be members of the club. One guy, Greg, isn’t exactly a football fan but he is a super nice guy and community spirited so he agreed to join. I recruited my friend Tommy Anjon to join and made him the treasurer (my friends from Roi and Ebeye will see the humor in that). It doesn’t take much on Roi to become a club officer. On my stay there I was commodore of the yacht club, secretary of the dive club, station manager, program manager, and secretary of the radio club, and secretary of the local charity. All it takes to become an officer is not being bright enough to take 2 steps back when they ask. I filled out the rest of the club by recruiting ladies I knew on Ebeye who were willing to allow their names to be used. They had no idea who the Browns were and I’m not sure they understood about the NFL either. Sadly I never quite got up to the 15 member requirement to be officially recognized. It would have been pretty cool both for the island and for the Cleveland Browns. They should have been more open minded in this case. But this year I’m sure they are going to win the Super Bowl.
In the Marshall Islands the most popular sport has to be fishing for the locals. Next to that it is probably basketball followed by volleyball. It is amusing to watch the ladies play softball wearing a muu muu. I think for the ladies they enjoy volley ball the most followed by softball. Rummy is enjoyed as a card game. Soon I plan to publish a blog about the legendary island of Arno that most every straight man on Roi dreams about.
Technorati Tags: Cleveland Browns, Football, Super Bowl, NFL, Marshall Islands, Kwajalein, Roi, Roi-Namur
Filed at 11:20 pm under Island Life by glennstu
My keyboard has been silent for a while. Partly because it has seemed that I have not done anything lately to live up to my trip to Ailinglaplap but mostly because I have been pretty busy with music. Around the end of February a Puerto Rican guy here named Ozzy asked me to play with his Latino band for a Hispanic Dinner Dance that was going to take place on Kwajalein. I had never played Latino music before but am rather fond of Mexican food so I agreed. The band was composed of 2 trumpet players, an acoustic guitar player, a drummer, and my friend Ozzy who played percussion and sang. Ozzy was the only Latino in the band. The rest of us were gringos. I started to practice with them and they had a list of about 10 songs that were pretty much the standard songs that gringos expect from a Latin music band…
Read more »
Filed at 12:25 pm under Sailing and Travel by glennstu
Several weekends ago while taking my friend’s 36-foot Catamaran Georgina on a shake out cruise we came up with the idea of sailing up to Bigeg to go camping. We chose Bigeg because my friend Eric’s girlfriend Cathner owns the southern half of the island. Bigeg is a fairly large island north of Ebeye and is part of the same atoll as Roi-Namor and Kwajalein. Eric keeps Georgina in Kwajalein for now though he has plans to sail her up to Roi eventually…. Read more »
