Marooned in the Marshall Islands

Let’s hope I never end up on a deserted island, because I could never make a decision on which three CDs to take with me.

-Willem Dafoe

Cold rain pelted my face as I watched a little boat pulling away from the strip of sand I was standing on. More raindrops left the beach around me covered in pock marks, and dark gray clouds enveloped the sky in every direction. This storm wasn’t likely to ebb any time soon, and that boat wouldn’t be back to get us for another thirty hours.

I turned to Vince, Rachel, and Jared and said, “We’re really stranded now!” My voice was filled with an excitement that seemed incongruous with our current situation. We were on our own, left to fend for ourselves for a day on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean during a rainstorm. This might not seem like an ideal situation to find yourself in on vacation, but this was the moment I’d been waiting for since we’d planned our trip to the Marshall Islands. 

Eneko Island, is a pristine little island that is a thirty minute boat ride away from the Marshallese capital, Majuro.  Covered in palm forest, and bordered by coral reef on one side, and windswept, rocky shores on the other, Eneko is the perfect place to escape from civilization for a night.  Eneko is owned and operated by Robert Reimers, the hotel we were staying at back in town.  There are rustic bungalows on the island, complete with electricity and plumbing, but we had to pack all of our own food and drinking water for our stay.  The island’s caretakers, who had unlocked our cabins for us, disappeared after check in, leaving us to explore everything the island had to offer on our own.  

With the present state of the weather, it seemed like an obvious choice to start with a snorkel in the lagoon.  Rain couldn’t bother us if we were in the water swimming anyway, so we changed into our bathing suits, and waded into the sandy shallows.  I pulled on my mask and slipped under the choppy surface to find an expansive coral reef teeming with life. 

I found a lot of interesting sea creatures in the reef, including a snake sea cucumber, a trumpet fish, and a flounder. All the while, large schools of reef fish darted around as I practiced my admittedly abysmal free diving skills.

We snorkeled and dove to our hearts content, taking short breaks at an anchored swim dock that was floating a short distance from shore. When we finally got worn out, we swam back to shore where we ate a snack lunch. Fortunately for all of us, Jared’s lost bag and finally arrived in Majuro early that morning, so we were reunited with all of the camp food he’d packed for our stay on Eneko. We had a feast of dried fruit and nuts, and a handful of slightly more perishable items we’d picked up from a supermarket in Majuro. We also made sure to drink plenty of water to rehydrate after spending a couple of hours in the lagoon.

Once everyone was as full of cashews as we could get, we decided to take a walk around the perimeter of the island. It was still raining heavily, so I didn’t bother attempting to bring my Canon with me, instead choosing the waterproof option of my GoPro. To our husbands’ chagrin, Rachel and I investigated every shell we found, hoping for some souvenirs from Eneko. Luckily for Vince and Jared though, every shell we encountered had a hermit crab living in it, so they all went directly back to the sand after we realized they were occupied.

We picked our way carefully along a rocky shoreline, made slippery by the rain, and hopped over fallen palms until we reached a shallow channel that separated us from the next island over. In contrast to our basic accommodations, the neighboring island had a much fancier looking boutique resort. Later we learned that a night there costs almost a thousand dollars. Compared to the $45 per couple we’d spent, I’d say we got the better deal. We were specifically looking for a rustic experience anyway. As much as possible, I wanted to feel like I was a castaway surviving in the wild.

In fact, we were all having a lot of fun, hamming up our “dire survival scenario.” The dismal weather only made the bit better as we pretended to look for food out of desperation, only to erupt into fits of giggles whenever someone cracked a joke.

It was low tide when we made it to the windswept ocean side of the island, which was much different from the sandy beach of the lagoon. The waves in the ocean crashed violently against distant rocks, while a flat, rocky shore was left exposed from the receded tide. This intertidal zone was the perfect place to find interesting sea creatures. Small, sandy colored eels kept wiggling away from us faster than I could get my GoPro out to film them, and we encountered lots of brittle stars along the way. We also found a smooth redeye crab. Apparently these are toxic to humans, but we weren’t planning to eat it so that wasn’t a problem.

We hiked around the entire shoreline of the island until we made it back to our cabin, and all vowed to tackle what we’d dubbed the “Eneko Traverse” again the next day when the weather was supposed to be nicer.

In the meantime, the constant rain was actually starting to wear on us. We were still in high spirits, but we were getting somewhat cold, and were decidedly tired of constantly being damp. In the spirit of island survival, we decided to attempt to make a fire. Vince rummaged around in his overnight bag, emerging with a large package of matches he’d purchased from the supermarket that morning. Much like everything else on the island and our persons, the matches were wet. We set to work collecting dead palm fronds from the ground. These were also wet. For every match that we manage to light, we wasted at least five, but eventually we got a soggy palm frond to catch fire. Unfortunately, the little flame fizzled out within seconds.

It went on and on like this for some time until we finally managed to get a somewhat sustained flame going. In fact, as long as we kept feeding the fire with more palm fronds, it was able to maintain a steady blaze. Nothing more substantial would light however, and whenever we slacked off on the palm fronds, the fire would flicker out to almost nothing.

Eventually we lost interest in fire making, and starting trying to crack open coconuts. After all, what island survival adventure is complete without eating a coconut? Vince managed to find a hard enough piece of coral to hit the coconuts with, and soon we were drinking fresh coconut water.

Around this time, the rain began to ease up, and I slipped off with my camera to take a few pictures of the island before sunset.

As I was rounding the bend to the ocean side of the island, I scared up a large crab, which quickly scuttled away into the sea. At the last second, one of the little eels we’d been seeing lunged out of a hole and caught the crab in its mouth! The eel was much too small to hang onto the crab, which promptly broke free and disappeared beneath the water, as I stood there in shock at the drama I’d just watched unfold. It had all happened so fast that I didn’t manage to get any pictures of it, although I did get some video of the eel, which slithered around unhappily for a bit before returning back to its hole in the rocky shoreline. These shots are included in the vlog I made of the trip, which I highly recommend watching to see my footage of this and lots of other awesome sea creatures.

I returned to camp and regaled the others with my tale of the eel attack. Then we ate our snack dinner as we watched geckos devouring moths on the side of our cabin.

When we’d had about as much gecko watching as we could take, we retired to bed, excited at the prospect of another day on Eneko with better weather in the morning!

Just as we’d hoped, we woke up the next morning to sunshine and a beautiful sunrise as the straggling vestiges of the previous day’s storm clouds lingered in the sky. 

We were still a bit jet lagged from our long journey to the Marshall Islands, so all four of us had naturally been waking up at six am for the past few days, whether we tried to or not.  This left is plenty of time for relaxing mornings, and in this case we had no schedule and no where to be so we took the opportunity to just chill out and meander around camp for a bit. Vince and Jared busted out their drones now that the weather has improved, Rachel read a book, and I wandered down the beach, thoroughly enjoying the sunshine. 

But before long, Vince, Jared, and I were itching to get into the water for another snorkel session. It felt so much better to jump in the water with the sun out.  The corals and fish looked much more colorful than they had the previous day. The cotton candy clouds floating above the bluest water I could ask for was exactly the deserted island experience I’d been dreaming of since we planned our trip.

We snorkeled for a couple of hours, eventually coming back to shore to rest and drink some water. I checked the time and realized it wasn’t even 10:00 am yet. There was still a a lot of day left to spend exploring the beaches and palm forests of Eneko before the boat came to pick us up.

I set off down the beach to do just that, and noticed Jared’s drone hovering above me as I walked across the sand. He was flying somewhat aggressively, making fast low sweeps of the shoreline. I ducked under some low tree branches, and when I came out on the other side, I could no longer hear the hum of the drone’s propellers. A few moments later I heard Jared call my name, and turned to see him hurrying towards me. He gestured upwards at the tree, and I instantly knew what had happened.

Sure enough, once he caught up to me, he asked, “Can you help me figure out where in this tree my drone just crashed?”

I looked upward at a sprawling tangle of leaves and branches, unsure of where to even start. The guys’ drones are tiny and this tree was huge, but we began searching the branches until Jared miraculously managed to spot the drone. It was wedged securely in a branch that was far out of reach.

By this time, Vince and Rachel had noticed our predicament and were on their way over to help, and between the four of us, we managed to devise a plan for retrieving the trapped drone. Rachel and Jared went back to their cabin to grab a bedsheet, while Vince and I found a long stick, and a lawn chair nearby, and dragged them across the sand to set them up beneath the drone. When we reconvened, Rachel and Jared stretched the sheet out between them, holding it up like a hammock below the drop site. Then Vince climbed up onto the chair and carefully started prodding the branch that held the drone with the long stick. I acted as spotter and also filmed the whole fiasco for my video.

It only took a couple of pokes with the stick for the drone to come tumbling out the tree, and Vince even managed to catch it before it hit the sheet. Somehow it was completely unscathed, without so much as a broken propeller. We all cheered and then walked back towards the cabins, already laughing about the incident.

After that debacle, I was ready to explore some more, so Vince, Rachel, and I set off down a trail that cut through the Palm forest behind the cabins. The sun was high in the sky now, and it was blazing hot outside, a major contrast to the previous day.

The trail was short, and ended at the ocean side of the island, where spindly, windswept palm trees tilted out over the beach as though they were trying to reach into the water. Tide was much higher than the last time we’d walked this way, and the rocky tidal flat we’d explored was completely underwater.

Large waves were breaking out at the edge of the tidal zone, and quickly dissipating as they hit the much shallower water surrounding the island. Vince decided to jump in for a swim because he loves swimming in surf, and I kept an eye on him until I was satisfied that the waves were losing their power before they reached him.

When I was sure he was safe, I ducked back into the forest to hide from the sun and to try to find birds. I managed to find a few white terns perched up among the palms. White terns are also sometimes called fairy terns, which is a bit confusing because there is another species of tern named the fairy tern, which has grey wings and a black patch on its head. The white tern, as its name would suggest, is entirely snowy white, save for its black beak. I’d seen these delicately beautiful birds soaring above the trees all day, and I was pleased the get a closer look.

After I snapped some tern photos, I retreated back to our camp. Even a short time in the forest had me feeling ready for another swim in the lagoon. The trade-off for having such good weather was that I was also extremely hot out, and swimming was the only real way to stay cool.

Upon arriving at camp I noticed a few newcomers on the beach. The 11:00 am boat had arrived to drop off day-trippers. Jared had befriended one of them and the pair were sitting in the shallow water next to the beach together. Vince and Rachel also turned up and we went over and introduced ourselves to Jared’s new friend, whose name was Lars. Lars was traveling alone and had spent the last couple of months hopping from country to country. Coincidentally, he was planning to be in Palau at the same time as us in about a week. I gave him the information for the dive shop we planned to use there so we could meet up again then.

Then we all grabbed our snorkel gear and got back in the water to cool off, explore the reef one more time, and have some fun diving off of the swim deck.

At low tide, we tackled the Eneko Traverse one last time, recovering the same path we’d walked during yesterday’s rainstorm. There weren’t very many critters out on the tidal flat this time, but I was able to take some nice photos of the ocean side of the island now that it was dry enough to walk around with my Canon.

By the time we made it back to camp, we had to start packing up for the boat ride off of Eneko. We gathered our things, then chatted with Lars some more until our captain arrived to take us back to Robert Reimers. We parted ways with Lars, promising to meet back up with him in Palau, and then boarded the boat. Palm tree covered islands rose from the sea along our path back to Majuro, and I enjoyed the feeling of the wind on my face as I soaked up my last views of the Marshall Islands.

I’d had so much fun during our short time in the Marshall Islands, and it had been amazing to get away from everything and connect with nature for a couple of days. I was sad that we had to leave Majuro the next day, but even though our time in the Marshall Islands was coming to an end, our trip was just beginning. The next morning we would fly to the second stop of our Micronesian vacation, the state of Chuuk, in the Federated States of Micronesia!