Ric wat happened with the quick sand 
I thought you'd never ask.
It was on the 1999 trip. Most of the work was focused on looking for airplane debris along the shoreline and back in the scaevola along the Nutiran shoreline. It was miserable work involving cutting transects back into the bush a hundred meters or so every 20 meters along the shore while scanning the ground for anything interesting. Sometimes the scaevola was so dense you couldn't cut your way through but had to clamber over the top and just look down. This was known as "working the high scaevola." It was dangerous because the scaevola was only marginally strong enough to support a man's weight and if it gave way you'd fall about five feet down onto coral rubble.
A secondary mission on that trip was to try to locate the place where Gallagher found the bones. The file in the Tarawa archives proving that the rumor about a castaway's bones being found was true had been discovered in 1997. We had tracked down the rest of the British correspondence about the bones in England in 1998. But Gallagher's description of where the bones had been found was fuzzy. One clue was his comment that the box built to transport the bones to Fiji had been made of kanawa wood from a tree that stood on the lagoon shore near where the bones were found. Kanawa doesn't grow everywhere on the island and one place where it once grew in abundance was a small peninsula called, aptly enough, Kanawa Point. One day a small party - me, Russ Matthews, John Clauss, and Dr. Kar Burns - took the lagoon skiff to check out Kanawa Point. As explained in the video, Kanawa Point is flanked by shallow inlets. We drove the skiff into the eastern inlet but it ran aground a good fifty meters from shore. Using the outboard was out of the question. I sized up the situation and said, "No point in you guys getting your feet wet. I'll just hop out and pull us the rest of the way in to shore." At which point I vaulted over the side and disappeared. What I had assumed was hard bottom was silt the consistency of soupy oatmeal that was deeper than I am tall. If I had not had a hand on the rope that ran along the skiff's gunwale I'd probably still be down there. As it was, I was clinging to the side of the skiff for dear life.
Now, you might think that my esteemed colleagues would react with alarm and immediately rush to my rescue - but that's not the way it works out there. Once they saw that I had a grip on the rope and was not in imminent danger of slipping away to a horrible death, they decided that the spectacle of me hanging by one arm, up to my chest in silt and up to my chin in water was just about the funniest thing they had ever seen. Eventually they stopped laughing, dried their eyes, and hauled me out.
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Topic: Aerial Tour of Nikumaroro (Read 26509 times)
