That's a wrap!

Sara and I had our last day of work in the Office of the Attorney General on Wednesday last week. Since then it's been a flurry of packing and paperwork (OK the paperwork part wasn't a flurry, it's just been showing up at the Payroll Office everyday for the past 8 days to get them to figure out my final payment and W-2 amounts). We had a tofa lunch with our coworkers last Friday and a Waterslide Tofa Party out at Coconut Point on Saturday. I walked away from the slide battered and bruised, but with a huge grin on my face. The grin was less enthusiastic on Sunday when one of those wounds started to get infected, but a trip to the emergency room and a double dose of antibiotics later, I'm good to go. Since then it's been farewells and packing. We had a wonderful goodbye dinner last night with a group at Moana O Sina. If we were able to get meals that nice and in that kind of atmosphere, there wouldn't be as much of a push from Sara and I to leave. Alas, the best meal I had on the island was my last night before flying out. Too little, too late to convince Sara and I to re-up. Next up is two nights in Honolulu followed by five weeks in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. Not sure what our internet connections will be during that time, but wanted to update the blog one last time before Sara and I shut off our internet connection here.

Mustache Slide

Not all the ridiculous parties we throw on island are worth a blog post. This one is. We did a mustache and waterslide party. It resulted in this video:

Who wants a Mustache Slide? from Alex Messina on Vimeo.

Which is awesome. Enjoy.

Price Per Pound

The Pacific Islands don't make international news very often for their business innovation. However, the new airline, Samoan Air, flying into American Samoa has managed to do just that. How, you ask, by charging passengers based on their weight. With through the roof obesity levels here, it will be an experiment that either does well or fails. The airlines currently flying between American Samoa and Samoa charge $120-$140 roundtrip per person. At $4.16/kg and 2.2kg/lb that's $1.89 per pound. Which makes Samoa Air cheaper than the competition if you weigh less than 74 pounds, not necessarily my choice at the moment.

UPDATE: the earlier article reported in Samoan tala (worth about $0.45). So the pricing actually works out to be $0.97-1.06/lb.

UPDATE II: Turns out the quoted price is per kilo and in dollars. So that makes it a little more price competitive. The break even point for the Pago to Apia flight ($0.93/kilo vs. $140 roundtrip)  is 165lbs. The better deal is flying to Savaii, where there currently aren't any flights from American Samoa (at $1.06/kilo).

Sinking Boats

Sara and I have been back from New Zealand for over a week, our photos are coming up soon. But some work related stuff couldn't wait.

Since I've been in American Samoa representing the Port, two marine vessels have sunk in the harbor. The problem is American Samoa has no laws dealing with abandoned or derelict marine vessels. Thus its difficult for the government to be proactive about dealing with these problem ships. To help alleviate this situation I drafted a proposed statute that lays out the procedure for noticing, removing and disposing of abandoned boats. The proposed statute is adapted from Alaska's Title 30, Chapter 30. After a bit of lobbying by the Coast Guard, the Director of Marine & Wildlife Resources, the Director of the Department of Port Administration and myself the proposed bill is scheduled for a hearing on Thursday morning.

The Attorney General has asked me to attend and testify on behalf of the Office of the Attorney General. I'm excited to see some action on this issue. With less than two months left on my contract, I'm eager to leave American Samoa with a better legal means of dealing with dangerous ships. I'll give an update after the hearing.

8 minutes from Auckland

I've got 8 minutes of internet to burn here in Auckland. It's been a great day thus far. Sara and I have been living a culturally austere lifestyle in American Samoa. Thus being dropped in a city like Auckland is a welcome thing for both of us. We hit museums, tapas bars, the yachts in the harbor and foreigners... and nice weather. We're off the visit the Northlands tomorrow. Should be another round of awesome.

A Programming Note

Sara and I are off to New Zealand (with a small layover in Samoa) for the next three weeks. Therefore we're scrambling to pack and I'm busy making it rain "pretend" money. Good times. We'll check back in when we're back in American Samoa.

Oh yeah, and Happy Valentines Day. Here's an ula for your trouble. We need to celebrate these occasions with a little island flair while we can.

Three Samoa Moments

There are some moments that we have on a daily basis here in American Samoa that pass without much notice. Things that would be very out of place on the mainland and may be against the law, violate various moral codes and otherwise not happen. A few recent examples from last weekend.

I went over to a friend's house for a barbecue on Saturday. I did something unusual for the island, I showed up at the scheduled time. In the palagi community, no one shows up until and hour to an hour-and-a-half after the scheduled time. However on this Saturday, I was lounging around our house without much to do, so I opted to be punctual.

Being on time left me greeted with a few of my friends butchering the meal in their front yard. They were hacking apart a yellow fin tuna, a mahi mahi and a wahoo in the bed of pickup truck. The fish were still frozen solid, straight from the hold of a purse-seiner. So "hacking" literally means bludgeoning a knife/machete/cleaver through solidly frozen fish with a hammer or using a serrated saw to part the head or the tail from the body. Imagine someone trying to saw or hammer their way through a 30 pound ice block while trying to leave the ice block in a few specific sized chunks.

It was gross and bloody work, especially after the out layers of the fish started to thaw. The flies were everywhere, eating up all the stray chunk of flesh that were scattered all over the ground and the pickup bed.

After about an hour, they were left with a giant cooler overflowing fillets, steaks and other cuts of the fish and a massive mess.

This also served as a welcome back to one of our friends who left 8 months ago. He had arrived back on the Thursday flight and moved in with the good Doc. He was moving from his grad student life in San Diego to the lifestyle where you could be asked to gut a fish at in afternoon for your evening meal.

Another thing he got when came back was a beater, island pickup. It was previously owned by one of the attorneys on island. It had sat around for three or four months before its new owner got back to claim it. Let this be a testament to how hard the climate and air is on everything. The roof of the truck had rotted out in the months it was sitting here.

It rotted enough that there were large holes located where the windshield and the roof meet. With as much rain as we receive on Tutuila this is a problem. Once our intrepid grad student got on island, he set about fixing the leaky rook. First, this took the form of keeping the rain off the roof and the interior long enough to get it to dry off in the Southern Hemisphere wet season. No easy task.

This solution took the form of an umbrella stuck directly into the holes in the car canopy. A site I'd never seen before. The truck's new owner was starting to sand off the rusted sections of the truck roof in anticipation of bond-o/sealing the holes.

It's a testament to the corrosive powers of heat, salt and water how quickly metals break down in t his climate. I've had paperclips rust apart in my backpack in only a few weeks. A few months will lead to some extreme results here.

 The last of the uniquely Samoan phenomena that needed cataloging was the toad we encountered in the pool on Sunday.

Sara had already gotten in the pool at our housing complex when I noticed something swimming around the deep end. Turns out a cane toad had fallen into the water and couldn't make its way out. I had a bit of a moral dilemma about this situation. On one hand, the cane toads are an invasive predator that has gone a long way towards displacing a number of native reptiles, amphibians and birds in the environment. They are poisonous and have overrun the ecosystem around where we live. On the other side, a dead toad floating around the pool would probably decommission one of our few reprieves from the wet season heat. It's one of the few perks of living where Sara and I are. We regularly host a wide swath of our friends on hot weekends for cocktails and pool times.

With a little debate with Sara we opted to keep alive our escape from the heat and humidity. I fished the toad out of the water. He'll live to eat and reproduce. Sigh. Only in American Samoa do you need to fight these little battles on a daily basis.

Tsunami Watch Passed

Following the Solomon Islands earthquake, I hustled home, only to get stuck in traffic on the coast road, as work crews were trying to clear a landslide and debris that had partially covered the road during the heavy rains of the previous day. After a 45 minute delay I got through the bottleneck and made my way home, to where Sara had been spending her sick day.

We had about an hour and a half before the waves were supposed to hit American Samoa, so we packed the car with water, canned goods and other essentials. Then we made plans to meet a few friends at the hotel/restaurant/bar higher up in the Tafuna Plain.

Right as we pulled into the parking lot we got the news that the tsunami watch had been cancelled, as the waves were only 3-feet high when they passed through New Caledonia. Still we decided to use the evening at the hotel and celebrate our friend's birthday, as we were already there. So after three hours of slow service and enduring a menu that was out of most things we could eat; we'd celebrated a birthday dinner with as much use caution as we could given during the hours the tsunami would have purportedly struck.

The key is not letting ourselves ignore these disaster warnings. We don't want to get in a boy who cried wolf situation and get in trouble when one does strike our island hard.

Tsunami Watch

Living on a small Pacific Island is not without its dangers. In September 2009 a large tsunami struck Tutuila and cause some widespread damage.

Looks like we're on a tsunami watch and possibly in the path of another large wave following a 8.0 earthquake in the Solomon Islands.

The tsunami would reportedly get here in about two to three hours, let's see if the tsunami alert system is functioning this time.

Also, I should probably get to higher ground...

Cyclone Garry was a Near Miss

We had another near miss with a cyclone this weekend. While the rest of the U.S. was celebrating MLK Day and the President's second inauguration, Cyclone Garry swept north of our island. The big concern was if the storm was going to turn south. The storm kept its easterly course and we never got more than a drizzle and some light breezes, despite warnings of 70mph winds and flooding. Next it looks like Cyclone Garry is off to the Cook Islands.

A Win for Sanctuaries in AmSam

Too often in law, the results of your court victories don't come to much, a paper judgment that will never get paid, a dismissal that bounces around on appeal for years or motions that the judge sits on until they forget about it. So for once it's nice to see a postive, actual result for one of my cases. Back in December 2011, I had to defend the America Samoa Government's ability to revoke the clearance of a fishing boat accused of pollution violations in an injunction hearing. Maybe all the news outlets didn't get my name right, but it was a nice win in a preliminary injunction hearing on only a few days notice.

Jump ahead a year, and now ASG is looking to receive half-a-million dollars for its Nation Marine Sanctuaries Foundation from the criminal conviction of that pollution case. So there's a few years of funding for the Marine Sanctuaries of American Samoa that I had a small hand in securing. Yay!

Ofu Coral

A little follow up on our July trip to Ofu. The coral reefs of Ofu were recently the subject of a study on coral bleaching, specifically how the coral there has avoided coral bleaching, despite the high water temperature.

We were able to enjoy the snorkelling there without appreciating the unique biochemistry that keeps it lush, but still pretty cool to learn.