The LCU (Landing Craft, Utility) is built for work, not show. The pilot house is on the starboard side (the right side looking toward the bow), and most of the deck is a flat area suitable for stacking cargo and parking vehicles. Just like the landing craft in the World War II movies, the bow is a flat ramp that drops down for the vehicles and cargo to move onto and off of the beach. Standard equipment for trips to unimproved sites such as Lae includes a pallet truck for moving around the supplies and a bulldozer. The latter is mostly for emergencies - assisting the pallet truck if it gets stuck or breaks down, and pushing or pulling the LCU if it needs help on the beach. Tonight the LCU Manassas headed to Lae Island with a new weather balloon crew of two students, various supplies, and a man from the generator shop (to service the generators). It should arrive tomorrow morning, then head back to Kwaj in the afternoon, arriving after midnight. I know the current crew is ready for the swap, although the ride is frequently rough enough that medicine for, um, "motion discomfort" is recommended. One interesting wrinkle in this resupply is that the old crew had to generate the grocery list, even though it's the new crew that will be eating the food.

They are really lucky the resupply run was tonight. Last night we had a real gully-washer (my father's phrase for a hard rain). I was fast asleep because the forecast briefing was scheduled for 4:30 a.m., but some of my colleagues got caught in it. We got 2.5 inches in about 50 minutes, and the puddles were more than ankle deep in lots of places. As usual there was no lightning, just buckets of rain. From the standpoint of our project this was great, except it happened early enough in the night that the system had rained itself out by morning. So, the forecast briefing revealed the likelihood that it would be a beautiful, sunny, rainless day. Aircraft flights were scheduled in the hopes that something might develop, but they proved unnecessary. As I rode to the Operations Center after lunch, I spotted some cumulonimbus clouds far out to the east. The radar and satellite images seemed to show that they were almost 100 miles away!

While we were working on the Lae resupply I saw a 3-inch lizard, which reminded me of how sparse wildlife is on Kwaj. A few residents have pets, but none of the wild land animals get much bigger than the lizard. I think it's just too far from any other land areas for them to have made it on their own. A couple of issues ago the base newspaper had a note about apparent sightings of a three-foot-long mangrove monitor lizard. It's assumed to have escaped from someone's house. There are some birds, although fewer than I might have expected. The most common appear to be sand pipers (or close cousins). The real profusion of life is in the water. After all, Kwaj is part of a coral reef, which is the proverbial hot spot of fish life. One of the prime recreational activities here is snorkeling (and scuba diving) to see the sea life that you normally see only at the big aquariums.

George Huffman