Makemo, Tuamotus, French Polynesia 11 11 2011 11:11.11 16S28 143W50
Here we are at the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th year of the 21st century – Armistice day. Makemo is not such a bad place to celebrate such auspicious numbers and dates. Although we’ve replaced Armistice Day with Veteran’s Day in the US, the French still celebrate today as the end of all the world wars (They had another day in May for WWII, but apparently it was starting to add up to too many holidays and they had to combine a few or loose a few – imagine! The French! Agreeing to loose a holiday! Leaders of the 35 hour work week, lovers of the give-no-quarter when it comes to time off! What’s the world coming to? So we’re not taking the day off (sigh), school is in session; but we will be eating canned sauerkraut for dinner in celebration (a meal now French only because Alsace was returned to France as part of the Versailles Treaty in 1919).
A couple days ago, we left our quiet, blissful spot at Tahanea, and spent all night tacking between atolls to make it 40 miles east here to Makemo. We then had two hours of lagoon crossing, our eyes peeled for bommies (AUS), coral heads (US), patates (FRA) – known onboard as potato heads (SL). We managed to avoid them all and settled in the lee of what must be the longest motu around (roughly 30 uninterrupted miles – the whole atoll is 36 NM in length, second only to Rangiroa in length). The winds are back to their steady trade-wind state, 15-20 knots from the east. With miles of flat, potatohead-free lagoon at our stern, Frank may attempt a windsurfing lesson for PE today (the board and sail are the spoils of helping a friend clean out his garage – both saved from certain destruction due to mouse colony expansion).
So far the left shoe data is ambiguous here on Makemo, due to two, unmatched, uni-sided dive fins found (along with 4 left shoes and 4 right). Would the fins have been worn on the person’s left or right foot when they became detached? One of our correspondents has theorized that the right leg is tastier; shark’s would likely agree with the cannibals on this point, in which case they could well be left fins. Another correspondent suggested that the Coriolis* effect may be at work, causing more lefties south of the equator, but we will not be able to test his hypothesis until we make it back to the northern hemisphere. Even if the Coriolis force does play a role, it is possible that we would still find a higher density of right shoes as we approach the equator due to counter-currents. We may need to crowd source our data gathering efforts and add a shoe tally tab to our website so we can expand our data pool to include a global view. I won’t get to this task for a couple months (due to lack of internet in the Tuamotus), so in the meantime feel free to note the GPS coordinates of any shoes you find beached, and note their side: L, R, or unknown, and I’ll let you know when the survey is up and running. We will not guarantee a share in any grant income, but your efforts will be recognized in any future research publications on this topic (unless you prefer anonymity). Hopefully with enough data gatherers, we’ll be able to overcome any research bias, from individual data gatherers skewing data due to a preference for one hypothesis over others. While I know none of you would intentionally dirty our data pool…**
xoxomo
*”On the earth, the effect tends to deflect moving objects to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern” **http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/03/07/people-don’t-know-when-they’re-lying-to-themselves/