I've been experimenting this week. Damascus Go Mai. The jacket is 60 layers of 1095 and 15n20 with pure nickel surrounding a core of 1095. I think it went well. Thanks to @tony_swatton for the Ni. #blacksmith #bladesmith #damascus #damascussteel #gomai #patternwelded #paringknife #cooking https://www.instagram.com/p/CY41NuKPjLR/?utm_medium=tumblr
Day 6: Leaving Gomai tomorrow, we don’t wanna leave…
I spent my days at Gomai recording under- and over seas in a very noisy jungle on the islands around (Taukuna and Gomai, listen in previous post), diving to the reefs staring in the eye of clown-fish, painting the unbelievable colors of the reef waters, making some binaural tests on sounds of sea bottom with sand and dead corals, and exchanging with the people of Gomai whom we'll miss!
Peter the teacher and his four children, Marta and Chris the diver, and of course all of the kids we met at the village's school when we made a presentation of the expedition. We showed a film about the project - it took a while to find a strong enough generator for the projector, in a village organized without electricity.
This afternoon I boarded a pirogue to go swim ashore with the other kids and learned a few words of the village's language with Meri, Melinda and Anna. There's about 70 local languages spoken in the Solomon, while Pidgin (mixture of Melanesian grammar and English vocabulary) is used to communicate between different islands and provinces. The kids have their local language as mother tongue, then learn pidgin then English at school.
No one lives on the west coast of Bougainville by the sea, due to the old tradition of head-hunting that was conducted by the Shortland Islanders... Peter the teacher told us. So every Thursday, a couple of boats leave Gomai towards the autonomous province of Bougainville to sell Shortland fish to people that still live up in the mountains. Tomorrow morning we’ll say farewell to the bay and the Shortlanders to sail North towards Bougainville then East New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea.
(pics below: the tiny island of Taukuna and its reefs just ashore Gomai, and kids on board Fleur de Passion checking out the hydrophone)
Day 4: Jungle at Gomai
Here’s an extract of the jungle West of Gomai village at sunset. It’s in binaural format so you should listen with headphones. Onsite the sound level was very high, and I was amazed to find it was a periodic soundscape!! - do you hear this?
Day 3: Navigation and arrival at Gomai
After two days of navigation Northwest up the New Georgia Sound we hit the Shortland Islands, the last Solomon province before Bougainville (PNG). These are very little navigated seas and no other boat was ever in sight. On the days we sailed I discovered the ship with its routines and many nuances of noises and sounds new to me, listened to the latest undersea recordings with Yaiza, the biologist on board, and prepared for composition. We passed the Kolombangara vulcano at sunset (upper picture), and the full moon made our nights very clear.
We found a bay on the map which looked like it could be interesting to explore, just North of Ghaomai (Gomai) Island. As we entered the bay many from the village headed towards the ship in their pirogues; we left Fleur de Passion anchored to go look for the village’s chief Silverio and ask if they would let us stay in the bay for the night or more. After two sets of friendly tractations Silverio accepted our staying for a few days against a compensation of food products (rice, salt, sugar and choucroute) as we had no Solomon dollars left. We agreed to present the expedition to the people of the village, if a generator could be used to run the projector - there is no electricity or data network anywhere around these provinces.