Letter from Tina!
The letter arrived with the order: Please put this up on the web directly, it is so cool!

/Ed.

21 Sept 2002
Tomorrow we arrive in Beveridge reef. Position 20.00S 167.47W, 3 days sail west of Palmerston atoll in the Cook Islands. Imagine a volcano that rises from the bottom of the sea at 4000 m depth to just below the surface. Its crater is fringed with a crown of coral that encloses a turquoise lagoon with a white sandy bottom at 3-18 m depth. The bordering coral-crown is constantly submerged below the water and nowhere is there land in sight. It's like a swimming pool in the middle of the ocean...

Palmerston

Palmerston is a tiny atoll in the Cooks Islands where William Marsters settled in 1862 with his Polynesian wife and her two sisters. When he died he had begotten 60 children by the three of them... He set up strict rules for intermarriage and thousands of his descendants live scattered around the Cooks and New Zealand, but the 3 branches of Marsters that still live on the atoll are today down to 50 who live in perpetual state of feud. We have already experienced that the No. 1 issue is as to who hosts the yachties on the island...

Update Sep 21

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