Politics
From Being Dead To Being Alive
Now he's subject of a political tussle
It took Raoiaoao Tavae five months and three weeks to make the 1089 kilometres boat trip from French Polynesia to arrive at Aitutaki in the Cook Islands on Wednesday morning, July 10. He hadn't planned the trip. By the time of his arrival, he'd lost rather a lot of weight. It was an inadvertent passage for Tavae, 55, a widower, who has been a fisherman since the age of 14.
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After setting out on a fishing trip from Faa'a, French Polynesia, one Friday morning last January in his 10-metre inboard/outboard craft, his engine broke down. He began drifting.
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He didn't see another boat for months until he was near Aitutaki, 140 miles north of the capital island of Rarotonga. It was just a couple of hundred metres away. He waved. The crew waved back. They didn't realize he was in trouble.
He'd first seen Aitutaki a week earlier. It was tantalizing. The low island slowly grew larger on his otherwise empty horizon. All he could think of was: would he reach it?
He'd lost count of the time he had been alone at sea, curled up in a small bow cubbyhole most of the time to avoid sunburn and exposure. He had marked the days at sea on the hull of the boat until March. Then exhaustion, loneliness and despair swamped him. Time became timeless.
At home Tavae's family had long given him up for dead. In French Polynesian custom, they had turned flowers and shells into necklaces and cast them into the sea in a last farewell.
One morning, some time after the sight of land had aroused hope; he awoke to hear the sound of surf crashing on to a reef. His boat was thrown on to the reef; once, twice, and then a third time to land grounded about 150 metres from Motukitiu, the last island of the Aitutaki chain.
He was terribly weak. He had lost 31 kilogrammes bodyweight. He wasn't certain he could make it alone that last 150 metres to shore. So he took the lid off the boat foam chill bin and using it partly as a float and partly as a sail and came ashore at last.
He staggered to his feet to wander across the small-uninhabited island. He was encountered by a tour party from the main island. Its leader thought Tavae was drunk. It wasn't until the drifter began talking in Tahitian that the guide realised that the emaciated figure before him wasn't suffering from a hangover.
Talking to Islands Business through an interpreter, the Reverend Rohi Tinia, Tavae gave a simple, unadorned account of his ordeal, of a duration few other people might have survived. Except for weight lost, he bore astonishing little signs of his experience.
"It's just my legs that are troubling me," he said.
He had left French Polynesia at 6.30 am to fish, first around Moorea, then Maiau, and then Huahine, where he was born. Then the engine of his 25-foot fibreglass boat died. He fired a flare, but that attracted no one. He tried to paddle, but couldn't make headway.
Huahine faded over the horizon. Each night and for most of the day he huddled out of the sun in a forward locker. Part of each day was spent scanning the horizon for a boat.
Days turned to weeks and then months. Sometimes it was cold. Sometimes the wind was strong. Sometimes the sea was rough enough to turn his open, but stout, hull over as it drifted sideways. He fished every day and his catches kept him alive, as did 13 bottles of water.
Tavae said he saw six islands before seeing Aitutaki and it took a week for him to drift on to its reefs. Admitted to Aitutaki's hospital for treatment for dehydration, Tavae was able to telephone his relatives in French Polynesia the same day.
"They were astonished, they didn't know how I could have lived to return from the dead," he said.
"I had been pronounced dead."
His wife died five years ago. He has five surviving adult children, an adopted son and six grandchildren. His boat is in good shape and is being kept at the house of Aitutaki's mayor.
Tavae was due to fly home to French Polynesia (July 17) in an aircraft sent from French Polynesia to pick him up. It arrived at Aitutaki with a doctor and a medical aide who checked him over and pronounced him fine.
The Mayor of Faa'a, Oscar Temaru, who is leader of French Polynesia's pro-independence party, also flew to greet Tavae, who is an old friend. They played soccer as youths and Tavae lives near Temaru's office. There was an emotional reunion at Aitutaki Airport as the two men, garlanded with flowers, were received by the Aitutaki Island Council with prayers and then a feast.
But Tavae's return to French Polynesia became a political tussle. Temaru accused French Polynesia's president, Gaston Flosse, of trying to make political gain by sending the plane from Papeete. The official search for the fisherman had lasted only a day whereas a huge effort had gone into an unsuccessful search for a plane that in June disappeared with prominent politicians it was carrying.
"He was not interested in coming to get Tavae until he heard that I was coming to collect him personally," Temaru told the Cook Islands Herald.
Tavae refused to board his pro-offered government transport and returned the long way home via Rarotonga and Auckland. Tavae said he would keep his boat at Aitutaki because " I will return to Tahiti to get all my stuff and come back here and live for good. I like the life here. My wife is dead and that is why I want to come back.
"As a fisherman in the Cook Islands, when I look at the fish they are closer to the reef. In French Polynesia, when you go fishing, there's hardly any fish."
