Category: Marshall Islands

As already reported we took the canoes for a trial and sailed to the uninhabited island Bok. It is only 50 m in diameter and nobody is living there. As part of an international cooperation I (Henrik) will collect litter on various places throughout the Marshall Islands. The litter is not just collected but sorted, counted and weight. In addition it is tried to figure out where the individual items come from, mainly by looking at the labels. This kind of survey is usually done on a 100 m long sample of the coastline. For Bok island I had to shorten it to 20 m. There was just to much trash to collect it all in time. The 20 m already resulted in 4 h work and a huge pile (about 1 cubic meter!). That said I couldn’t even pick all of it because it is pushed deep into the shoreline vegetation by waves. Its just crazy how much trash you can find on these uninhabited islands. But the most crazy thing is that after picking it all up I had to put it back on the beach because there is no place in the entire country to get rid of it!

The first two weeks of the assignment for the GIZ implemented Low Carbon Sea Transport project (LCST) in Majuro passed by quickly! Boatbuilding training at WAM has already started and we took the WAM Cat no. 3 out for a sea trial to uninhabited Bok island. This tiny island of about 50 m in diameter is located approx. 25 nm from the WAM campus. Its not an easy sail because its downwind first and upwind to get back home. It was very interesting to see the third version of the WAM cat performing since this model got a different transom shape.

Next week is going to be even more exiting because be go with a WAM team to Aur atoll to check on the Proa design sailing there.

We came together with Christian Weigand from Blue Awareness and made an episode of the podcast “Helden der Meere”. You can stream it either on the Blue Awareness website, on spotify or multiple other streaming services of your choice. It’s unfortunately in german only. In summary we talk about our experience in the Marshall Islands, especially with WAM and the GIZ implemented Low Carbon Sea Transport Project. Main focus is on climate change.

While winter is hitting the northern hemisphere I (Henrik) are back in the Marshall Islands to continue the work with WAM as part of an assignment for the GIZ implemented Low Carbon Sea Transport Project (LCST). The main focus is keeping a track on the boats we built early 2020. Two of them are extensively used on the outer islands while three of them are actually undergoing modifications at the WAM workshop.

So far the weather hasen’t been good enough to take some decent photos but they will follow at time. Maybe already a short preview on some obvious changes compared to 2018 and 2020 I noticed in Majuro:

• Coastline erosion is prominent everywhere, trees are washed away
• Beaches disappeared
• Plastic trash is piling up

Despite the War in Europe we have more sad news unfortunately. Waan Aelon in Majel, the organization in the Marshall Islands we support, burned down last night. Fortunately, nobody was harmed but both workshops, the canoe house, most of the tools, the entire office, old artifacts and multiple canoes were destroyed.

This is a heavy loss for the Marshall Islands and the hole world. In the past 30 years WAM has not only trained hundreds of young people in traditional arts and life-skills, WAM also documented canoe sailing and is a key institution for the transitioning to low carbon shipping by combining indigenous knowledge and modern science. We had just rebuilt and renovated large parts of the WAM campus to host more workshops for canoe building.

The WAM family is like a second home to us. It is impossible to bring back the things that were lost to the flames but we do not leave or WAM family behind! Please help us to finance the most crucial reconstruction! If every one gives a few bucks we can rebuilt WAM together. You can donate on gofundme:

https://gofund.me/b0f71447