Supply Ship day

Last Tuesday was supply ship day. Pitcairn receives supplies twice a year every six months via the Government chartered ship the ‘Claymore II’.

The Claymore loads up will all of the supplies for the island, such as provisions for the store, mail, building supplies, petrol, diesel, new fridges, washing machines etc at NZ. It departs NZ on a two week trip to Pitcairn. Once it gets here, it spends a day unloading, then heads off to Mangareva (an island in the outskirts of French Polynesia, in the Gambier Islands – closest airport to Pitcairn) At Mangareva, the Claymore picks up a load of passengers, and takes them back to Pitcairn – this is a two day trip. After passenger drop off, a load of people leaving Pitcairn are picked up and ferried to Mangareva. Then back to Pitcairn, and then back to New Zealand. Six months later, it does this all over again.

This ship is the only regular, reliable way to get to Pitcairn and its how I will be leaving in a weeks time (yikes!) It’s very expensive and (as you can see) is no cruise ship…

However, back to supply ship day. The ‘able bodied’ Pitcairners are divided into four main groups, a group to man the longboats, one group at the landing to unload the boats, one group at the warehouse for building supplies and the last group at the store.

Unloading the boat

There is a lot of stuff to unload and everyone helps out where possible, this is also considered ‘public work’ and is therefore mandatory for the islanders of working age.
Container delivery to the store

I spent the bulk of the day helping out at the store – any excuse to be around any sort of shopping, even if it is mostly just food stuffs! Most people place large orders privately via the store – when you can only get supplies once every six months, you tend to bulk buy. A large portion of my day was spent lugging around 20kg bags of potatoes, onions, flour, sugar etc sorting out who got what. Working some fancy maths when orders had fallen short, exhausting work on a very hot day.
The Store

Everything was unloaded by around 3.30pm, so off to the post office to collect Dad dads six months worth of mail. Next it was time to head down to the landing to see Darralyn off (one of the islanders heading over to NZ for some nursing training.) and it wasn’t long before the harbour was filled with bodies escaping the heat. A fitting finish to a busy day!